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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2008, 240 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2009, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Amy Reading
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The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual of ways - by turns heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic.
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.
white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun,
I asked her why she hadn’t warned me about the wasps. "I’m not
that kind of angel," she said.
Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I’ve been
in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted
taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters
was pregnant - one very much augmented and on purpose, and the
other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence,
and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida
from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it’s a testament
to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to
blow through the phone tree and the two different receptionists
who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me.
"Papa is sick," said Charlotte.
"He’s been sick," I said, because this had been going on for a
year, and though nobody gets better ...
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...continued
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(Reviewed by Amy Reading).
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 ...
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