I don't think I could have guessed how powerful this novel would become just by having read the first chapter or two. Not that these were less than great by any stretch, but that they read as somewhat more expertly told but linear/basic storytelling; it had typical plot elements with the caveat of the author being an expert at metaphor, internal monologues, and general figurative language. But then the metaphysical and political elements come in... and holy shit. It slowly becomes one of the most profound looks at poverty, crime, the death penalty, and the desire to live. Almost like a cross between Kieslowski's "A Short Film About Killing" and some of the elements of Camus' "The Stranger". Definitely a mini-masterpiece.

Wow damn this book was great. The beginning was one of the strongest beginnings I've read in recent memory, just as far as like setting the stage and stuff.

Quit on page 50 -- can't read more than five pages at a time. Maybe one five-star paragraph so far and stray killer DJ lines throughout. But feels forced, diffuse, dull. Not into down and out right now, impatient, feeling like DJ is animating a certain awfulness to emphasize eventual transcendence or its lack. May return to at some point. Won't donate my copy for the local library book sale, that is.

An exceptional first novel by Denis Johnson. As in most of the books that he was to later write it was an incredible insight into the lives of those living in the underbelly of society. This was about a young woman named Jamie with two kids running away from her abusive marriage who meets an ex con named Bill Houston on a Greyhound bus. Their relationship developed from there but in a very dysfunctional way. It's a very rough and gritty story that ends disastrously but a fantastic read.

This novel is the literary equivalent of a switchblade knife. The prose is luminous. The story is biting. The characters are vivid. David Foster Wallace believed this novel to be sorely unappreciated, and I would have to agree with him. An outstanding work.

David Foster Wallace selected Angels as one of "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960." He wrote: 'This was Johnson’s first fiction after the horripilative lyric poetry of “Incognito Lounge.” Even cult fans of “Jesus’ Son” often haven’t heard of “Angels.” It’s sort of “Jesus’ Son’s” counterpoint, a novel-length odyssey of mopes and scrotes and their brutal redemptions. A totally American book, it’s also got great prose, truly great, some of the ’80s’ best; e.g. lines like “All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces."'

I'd add that it's clear this is the first novel of a poet - one who'd been reading a lot of Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, and William Blake. Johnson seems less concerned with crafting an elegant narrative arc and generating momentum than creating short scenes shot through with memorable images and ensuring each sentence is exquisitely wrought. Especially in its first half, the novel moves along in fits-and-starts that might put off people looking for something more conventional, but I was won over by the local quality of the prose and the finely observed gallery of sadsack characters. When it comes time for the climatic bank scene, Johnson steps up and turns in an absolutely virtuoso piece of storytelling, narrating the event from various perspectives for maximum impact, surprise, and substance. The final sections are meditative and hypnotic, achieving a desolate sense of grace that I can't recall from other novels. Many details hail from a late 1970s America that's now vanished, but there's a bedrock foundation to the characters' struggles and the story's bleak settings that makes Angels feel something like timeless.

This was Johnson’s debut novel and it’s well written and powerful. In Johnson’s short stories, the characters are often those who live on the edge of society. Junkies, alcoholics, and petty criminals populate these stories and Johnson chronicles their lives of quiet desperation with sympathy and insight. In Angels, Johnson again focuses on people living on the margins and while it’s far from an uplifting book, his characters come alive in all their flawed humanity. In the book, Jaime Mays, a woman with two kids in tow who has just left her trailer park and her husband, meets ex-con Bill Houston on a Greyhound bus. Born losers, they soon hook-up and their cross-country odyssey eventually ends in tragedy and madness. Johnson never sentimentalizes his characters; they are people who, when given a choice, always choose the worse one. The prospect of redemption hovers just beyond their grasp and there is an eventuality to their downfall:

“It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was. He found a cigaret and struck a match--for a moment there was nothing before him but the flame. When he shook it out and the world came back, it was the same place again where all his decisions had been made a long time ago”.

The dialogue rings true throughout the book and the writing is lyrical and filled with descriptive passages that burn brightly. The characters he introduces are well drawn and Johnson is able to lay them open with surgical precision and expose them at their core:

“He decided to go over a couple of blocks to Michael’s Tavern for something cold, and as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him – it was not the first time – that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in it’s midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth”

This isn’t a happy story, the characters are flawed and their decisions throughout the novel are bad. They are misfits living on the edge of society and filled with an emptiness that is always threatening to consume them..

This was a great first novel and, considering it was published in 1977, it is was a remarkable achievement. The 3 brothers in crime and their misanthropic parents were nicely done and the bleakness factor was very high (especially for 1977). The characters jumped around a bit too much to keep the narrative, but the ill-conceived robbery was tragically comic. The psychotic breakdown of the girl was almost too much to take, but creatively rendered to its logical disgusting end. I was nauseous about 3/4 through the book, but the finale in the Arizona prison was calming and beautfiul in its reconciliation with the inevitable. The politics of the time were reminiscient of Gary Gilmore and the author was a "teacher" in an Arizona prison so he knew his subject matter. Overall Johnson is a very talented writer and I'll read up his later work to see how it matures.

You can do whatever you want to us, he thought; but you can’t pretend like we never lived.

Angels is a book that tests the limits of your compassion. It doesn’t ask you for pity, like Hemingway, or disgust, like Kerouac-- it asks you for just a little love, whatever you can spare, for dispossessed and desperate people who, striving for a mere moment’s peace, slowly digest in the gastric belly of America.

This isn’t really a novel, or at least if you read it that way you’ll be disappointed. It’s poetry, really. There’s no plot to speak of, no form worth mentioning; but each sentence is a little gift to be unwrapped. It’s short, which is to its advantage-- I think another hundred pages would have made it unbearable; just too sad to keep on with. But at 200 pages, this little bible of poverty is just long enough to break your heart.

It’s too bad that everyone knows Johnson’s other book Jesus’ Son, but not Angels, which is vastly better. I recommend this to everyone, but with a warning: it will ask something of you. But even if you’re unwilling to give something back, the prose is wonderful and worth mulling over. Consider the immortal line: All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces.

In the ten years before Angels appeared, Denis Johnson was published solely as a poet and was an alcoholic and drug addict. Angels, his first novel, was written in the first years of his sobriety and is composed of one poetic line after another. Which is to say, it is composed of dense lines of close observation and astonishing leaps of insight and imagination, each of which rewards reading and re-reading. Slim and punishing, Angels is the work of a writer rubbed completely raw by the extremes of human experience and uniquely capable of conveying that beauty and horror to the reader.

Really struggled to get through this for some reason, until i picked it up today and read the last hundred pages in an hour completely transfixed

Such a gut wrenching, hollow chested little novel. Didnt really care for any of the characters til that final stretch. A greyhound to nowhere in the middle of night

4.5 stars. What an ending. The last 30 pages or so were absolutely worthy of 5 stars.