A Better Angel: Summary and book reviews of A Better Angel by Chris Adrian, plus links to an excerpt from A Better Angel and a biography of Chris Adrian.
A Better Angel Stories
by Chris Adrian
Hardcover: Aug 2008,
240 pages.
Paperback: Jul 2009,
304 pages.
The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual of ways. In “Stab,” a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A ne'er-do-well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father in the remarkable title story, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily disappointed heavenly agent. In “The Colony,” a young doctor travels to a remote island to study a mind-destroying illness and finds himself the victim of a transfiguring sympathy for the afflicted. And in “Why Antichrist?,” a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. Such miraculous and chilling events are not uncommon in Chris Adrian's world, which is by turns heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic.
With Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney's, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice.
A Better Angel is a spiritual book that is noteworthy for what it lacks. There are no gods or saviors here, only a few angels and one very reluctant antichrist. The characters are inhabited or visited by entities they do not understand and who rarely strike them as divine. The people of Adrian's stories seem determined to live ordinary secular lives, despite the miracles that erupt into the everyday, as when a nineteenth-century farmboy begins seeing visions of people plummeting from a skyscraper. They don't want to know that the world contains more than three dimensions, in part because the veil that shields us from such realms only flutters aside when there is suffering. (Reviewed by Amy Reading).
Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
His less successful tales — and unfortunately there are more of these — tend to be overly hectic, struggling for transcendent effect. B-
Los Angles Times - Lizzie Skurnick
You can't deny that Adrian's prose is lovely, and if his characters' consciousness rarely fits the role he's chosen for them, a real heart lies beneath. That's the stuff Adrian needs to find pumping -- in stories where they can live as themselves, not as jerky zombies rattling around the haunted houses of the soul.
Elle
Adrian's handling of 9/11 in several stories captures his strongest suits: an instinctive mistrust of the glib and easy, and an insistent undertow pulling toward greater depths.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With heartbreaking imagination, Adrian illuminates how people act out their grief on their own bodies and the bodies of others, and enter the world of the spirit in the process.
Kirkus Reviews
Abrasive, accusatory, despairing and, more than often enough, quite unforgettable fiction.
Booklist
Starred Review. The moment you feel as if you've discovered the meaning in his words, it slips between your fingers and leaves you unsettled, unmoored, and unmistakably impressed.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Amber bleak, yet thoroughly entertaining This book was an extremely well-written and imaginative collection of short stories, each one mildly incorporating the tragic events of 9/11. The stories range from intriguing to shocking, and I found the premise behind each of them highly... Read More
Rated of 5
by Behnoosh Afiat talab One of the ever best It is a very good short story with a strange atmosphere which you unconsciously drown in and cannot get out easily. During the story you feel close to the hero and even feel his suffers deeply in yourself maybe because you also have had the same... Read More
Chris Adrian may write about angels, but the man himself is a superhero.
He is a novelist…
He graduated with an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop
after completing a Bachelors degree in English at the University of
Florida. Mark Sarvas, a novelist and literary critic who blogs at The
Elegant Variation, remembers being an undergraduate at the University of
Iowa when Adrian was a graduate student. Word would get around whenever
Adrian was workshopping one of his stories, and the undergrads would
sneak into the grad student office to steal the photocopies. His
previous novels are
Gob's Grief and
The Children's Hospital, which share characters with each other
though they are set in different centuries. Some of those characters
recur in A Better Angel, as does the setting of Severna Lake,
Maryland.
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures invites us into a world where the ordinary becomes the critical in a matter of seconds. A formidable debut, it is a profound and unforgettable depiction of today’s doctors, patients, and hospitals.
These are 2 of the 5 readalike suggestions for A Better Angel. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
First time novelist Vaddey Ratner captured my heart and senses in this novel based on her childhood in Cambodia. Her story transcends any news story...
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From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
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Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
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Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
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(975 words).
Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
of 5
by Amber
Write your own review!
He graduated with an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop
after completing a Bachelors degree in English at the University of
Florida. Mark Sarvas, a novelist and literary critic who blogs at The
Elegant Variation, remembers being an undergraduate at the University of
Iowa when Adrian was a graduate student. Word would get around whenever
Adrian was workshopping one of his stories, and the undergrads would
sneak into the grad student office to steal the photocopies. His
previous novels are
Gob's Grief and
The Children's Hospital, which share characters with each other
though they are set in different centuries. Some of those characters
recur in A Better Angel, as does the setting of Severna Lake,
Maryland. 
