Street credibility a palate, dialoghi tragici e spassosi allo stesso tempo, consapevolezza e descrizione degli spazi e degli ambienti liminali dell'hinterland americano gustosissime. Also, gran bell'incipit e finale peso, con un sottotesto di riflessione sulla violenza di classe. Tantissima roba.

You’re a college student (early 90’s), trying your best to keep up with your class work while juggling a full-time job.

For the upcoming semester you decide to go with ‘Short Novel', figuring it’ll be a bit easier than some other (lit) classes offered.

The syllabus has a few classics you know… Chopin’s The Awakening, Kafka’s The Trial.

But your professor wants to start things off with a personal favorite of his – Angels by Denis Johnson.

(You haven’t heard of the book or author… there’s no way it can hang with Burgess or Hurston that you’ll be tackling later in the semester, right?)

Ahhh, well... by the end of the semester Johnson has officially become your all-time favorite writer, even if you haven’t gotten to any of his other works… yet.

An incredible debut.

The likes of Palahniuk, Thom Jones and Neil LaBute seem to be the better-known (more successful) writers (occupying a similar space) but none of them can craft a story with half the skill as Johnson had.

And when Denis passed away in 2017 there’s a legit sadness that you’ll never get to read anything else by him.

(So you start to reread his older works and Angels in 2024 is just as amazing as it was over 30 years ago.)

"Coming in behind him through the rear window, the morning sun turned the truck's interior an unbelievable gold, the gold of conquistadors, the gold of obsession and enslavement."

"Baptism seemed just another way of getting yourself wet."

Jamie and her kids should have just stayed in Oakland.

Denis Johnson writes some really dark stuff, even for noir. I tried to care about Jamie through her 5 year old Miranda and baby Ellen...but aside from one incredibly horrible interlude in Chicago, I could not connect with her. Some authors can write from the perspective of or about a character of the opposite gender, but sadly, Denis Johnson isn't one of them. At least for me.

I do know that he had struggles early in life - in his mid teens - that tie to some of what Jamie faced, but maybe I'm too cheery a bird to relate.

Bill had potential to grab me, since his brothers and mom rolled into the story, but when he went up the pipe, I was just glad to see him go.

Really powerful writing, but the only happy spot was noting that Stroh's beer is Shorts spelled backward. Too noir for me, over all.

This is my second Denis Johnson book. The first was the same volume that introduces many people to Johnson's work, Jesus' Son. In both cases, Angels and Jesus' Son were recommended to me by three different mentors in my MFA program. Prior to that, his reputation and win of the National Book Award hadn't even registered on my radar. Today, I am a certifiable fan of his work.

Angels tells the story of Jamie Mays (with her two children) and Bill Huston serendipitously meeting on a Greyhound bus as they both escape from their pasts. When these two characters meet, the perverted promises of the American Dream collide into the dreadful realities of ruined expectations. The grindhouse of our culture chew their little hearts up and spit them out onto the brutal Midwestern pavement. Like reality, the pornographic horror of life shatters whatever hope remains at the end. Violent, disgusting, tragic, and true, Angels is an unparalleled achievement in modern literature.

Johnson's savage and striking prose build up a narrative that accomplishes some stellar feats of magic in just over two hundred pages. The ugliness of his story is handled with expert sentences and surgically precise language. The true miracle is the three-dimensional world and its characters Johnson presents in such sparse, exact language. A truly excellent book.
In a strange coincidence, I finished Angels on the night he died and updated my Goodreads the next morning. On the afternoon of the 25th, the news broke that this prolific American writer died. Every writer I knew bled on social media for our dear loss. Based on his two books I read in the last six months of his life, my mourning is strangely, incomparably, coincidentally, and suddenly now. I will miss the man I never knew, but whose books arrested my heart in an instant.

Death Is The Mother Of Beauty

"Sunday Morning" is a meditative poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 -- 1955) that celebrates the beauty of the physical world and its transience juxtaposed with themes of religion. Stevens tells his story through a beautiful woman gazing at the sea. The phrase "death is the mother of beauty" occurs twice in the poem. In stanza V, Stevens writes:

"She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires."

In the following stanza, Stevens says:

"Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly."

On one level, Denis Johnson's first novel "Angels" (1983) could hardly be more different from Stevens' poem. Stevens and his character are erudite, highly educated, and well to do. The characters in Johnson's novel are drug users, alcoholics, and criminals all of whom are emeshed in poverty. They lack the rudiments of an education which would create interest in a writer such as Wallace Stevens.

Yet, there is a clear and often repeated allusion to Stevens' poem in "Angels". The final scene in Johnson's novel is set in a dismal prison in the Arizona desert where one of the primary characters, Bill Houston, is awaiting execution. The gas chamber in which Houston is to be executed bears the (unattributed) inscription "Death is the mother of beauty." Houston meditates on the meaning of this difficult phrase as he awaits his fate: and the haunting line becomes a way to get to think about Johnson's story.

"Angels" offers a gritty look at American low life in the 1980s. The two primary characters, Bill Houston and Jamie Mays, meet on a cross-country Greyhound bus from Oakland. Jamie has two small children and is fleeing her marriage in the hope of meeting up with her sister in Hershey, Pennsylvania. On the bus, she begins a relationship with Houston, an alcoholic ex-con and Navy veteran. The relationship takes the couple through the streets and bars of Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Phoenix and through much sleaze and violence. After Jamie is brutally raped in Chicago, she and Houston take the bus to Huston's family home in Phoenix. Huston, his two brothers, and another man attempt the heist of a large bank, in a scene reminiscent of many film noirs The heist goes awry and the four men are picked up. Bill Houston is tried for the killing of a guard. Jamie for her part suffers a nervous breakdown and is institutionalized. She works to become free of alcohol and substance addiction.

Johnson tells a story of grimness and sadness while showing as well an affection for his people with all their self-inflicted wounds. The book is less a cohesive novel than a series of interconnected vignettes. It succeeds in finding beauty in its characters and places through its writing. Like Stevens, Johnson is a poet who illuminates the lives he sees through writing and imagination. While in "Sunday Morning" Stevens saw the transience, beauty, and spirituality of life through the thoughts of a cultivated, beautiful woman, Johnson works to show these traits in the lives of his down and out characters.

Johnson is probably best known for his book "Jesus' Son" which I have read together with his late novella "Train Dreams". In many ways, the lurid beauty of "Angels" may capture Johnson at his best. I was glad to read this first novel and to think about it together with one of my favorite poems and poets.

Robin Friedman

Denis Johnson wrote one of my favourite novels of all time: Jesus's Son. Since then I've read other books of his, trying to find that magic again; the poignancy mixed with the poetry, the mastery and mystery behind his written words. I have come across it, but not in the same supply or force as found in that one particular masterpiece.

Johnson's first novel 'Angels' definitely possesses his signature talent here and there. It follows the ill-advised journey of Jamie, a woman who has left her husband with two children in tow. She has the misfortune of running into (and shacking up with) Bill; a man with questionable ethics and loose morals, but someone just as lost in America as she is. Together they embark on a downward spiral into drugs, drinking, crime, and the penalties people incur when they don't know when to stop.

The story packs a punch in places, and takes the reader on a wild and tragic ride, but it is generally less controlled, less compelling, and more meandering that I was expecting. Johnson is a powerful writer all right, and this story was enough of a vehicle for what he wanted to say, but his first time out had some engine troubles and spun its wheels enough for me to give it three stars.

Angels confronts the wreckage of human lives with a clarity that borders on the divine. Written during a time when Johnson was pulling himself from the depths of addiction, the novel feels like both a confession and an absolution, but one without the comforting resolution often found in tales of redemption. This is what makes Angels so arresting: it dares to find something luminous in the darkest places, where survival itself becomes a kind of holy act.

The novel’s narrative revolves around two characters, Jamie and Bill, both wandering through the wreckage of their lives, looking for something to anchor them. They’re not saints—they are thieves, addicts, and outcasts. Yet, Johnson’s portrayal of them isn’t cynical or nihilistic. Instead, there is an unspoken reverence in his treatment of their struggles, as if their fractured existence holds an untouchable, spiritual beauty. It’s this tension between the degradation of their circumstances and the aching hope beneath that gives the novel its unique power.

Shifting perspectives in Angels amplify this sense of dislocation, as the reader is pulled between different points of view, never fully grounded in one person’s reality. This mirrors the characters’ own disoriented journey through life, as they try to find meaning in a world that seems indifferent to their pain.

Wow, I wasn't expecting to love this. Picked it up because it was recommended by David Foster Wallace.

It starts off with two of the main characters meeting on a greyhound bus - Jamie with her daughters running away from her husband and Bill Houston who's a drifter full of swagger and getting by on petty crimes. They both weave in and out of each other's lives. Later on in the book, Denis introduces many other characters from Bill's family and I did not expect to grow so fond of them all. Don't get me wrong, none of the characters have any redeeming qualities. They don't have much going for them other than poverty, drugs and alcohol. They make very poor choices. They're nobodies.

Bill and his brothers get involved in a get-rich-quick scheme and that's when things take a turn for the worse.

Denis poses his characters to be just what they are. Nothing more, nothing less. The NY Times called Angels "a terrifying book, a mixture of poetry and obscenity." This is his first novel, having only published poetry prior to this.

At just over 200 pages, this book packs a bigger punch than many of the fatter books living on the bookshelf. I would recommend this book, but it's upto you to decide if you can handle it.

Second read. My god. One of my favourites. Just realised, I read it again almost exactly 2 years ago...how's that huh.

Bleak and somber, but not without rays of light and humanity that illuminate the dark corners of American life chronicled in Angels. An absoltuely gem to say the least.

Angels makes for a vivid reading experience, the kidnapping kind - Terrible people are swarming and their rotted hands are seizing your heart in a cold, sharp squeeze. You've never liked any of them but you're pulled into their personal train wreck until the ends - plural - free you, gasping. It feels very much like a nightmare. But you don't forget.

TW - graphic rape, drug use, racist and homophobic slurs, racist rhetoric, suicidal ideation, graphic violence

Very occasionally I come across a book that has such an impact on me that I wonder how could it have taken so long for me to discover and read it. Sadly also, it was because of Denis Johnson's recent death that I uncovered it, from the forum in the TLS of The Guardian. In there a contributor wrote that it was more powerful than Train Dreams, and I was hooked in - how could it be?

The story is about Bill Houston, an ex-con living on his wits and petty crime in Chicago dreaming of the criminal big time when the novel begins. On a Greyhound bus he meets Jamie who with her two young daughters is escaping Oakland and her husband. They team up, and as nothing is going their way in Chicago they move to Phoenix where Bill's family are based. Johnson spends a wonderful few passages describing Bill's mother and his brothers. His life in Phoenix soon mirrors the Chicago days, until he and his brothers come up with a plan to get rich quick.

Johnson's writing of the harshness of life for Bill and the people he mixes with is extremely powerful. This is what I would call classic US noir. I have enjoyed similarly well-written books by Willy Vlautin, Joe Lansdale, Donald Ray Pollock, Jim Thompson and Urban Waite. First published in 1983, this was Johnson's first novel. An impressive start, though I recognise this is not for everyone. It is bleak and brutal with few if any lighter moments.

"As you stare into the vackyoom of his eyes. How does it feel." Poignantly Dylan plays on the radio in one of the novel's key scenes.