Sparse, dark insights

Press, 8 February 1986, Page 20

Sparse, dark insights

Angels. By Denis Johnson. Penguin, 1985. 209 pp. $9.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley) This strange and powerful novel begins as Jamie boards a Greyhound bus going east from Oakland, California. Though hampered by her two small children, Miranda and Baby Ellen, she has cut loose from marriage to a man who continually “had his face in his arms, hiding from the pictures in his own brain.” This brilliant, sparse, one-paragraph description of the deserted, bewildered husband is an early indication in the novel of the ability of this new young novelist to disturb and move the reader with his insight into the meaningless aridity of his characters’ lives.

During the days on the bus, Jamie meets Bill Houston and together they move on through a series of incidents which reveal some of the horrifying undercurrents of the American way of life. Sleazy motels and cafes, drug induced nightmares, a violent rape, and an armed bank robbery are depicted in Johnson’s angry, but controlled prose. The appalling ending in the Arizona State Prison will haunt the memory long after the book is finished. Not a “comfortable read” (and certainly not the cheap sex and violence that the unattractive cover design suggests), “Angels” is a savage, biting and original first novel which involves the reader uncomfortably in a dark and relentless world.