Reading the Alphabet: Angels & Astragal

Reading the Alphabet is a fun (imo?) way to tackle my to-be-read pile. Moving through the alphabet, I’ll pick two books that both begin with the same first letter and happen to be sitting on my shelves. Reading these two books, I’ll see if I can find any similarities and do a sort of compare/contrast situation. Naturally, we’re kicking off the series with the letter A which meant I spent the week reading Angels by Denis Johnson* and Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin.

I started both of these books without reading the blurbs and didn’t think they were going to have anything in common. But, then! I discovered both novels are debuts and stories of the disenfranchised. Albeit, Angels is the story of America’s disposed in the 1980s while Astragal is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of the author’s escape from prison in 1960s France.**

Angels begins on a cross-country Greyhound bus where runway wife Jamie Mays, mother of two, meets Bill Houston, a former Navy officer and conman. The duo strike up a relationship and flit from one city to another. Moving from motel rooms to bus stations to bars, the American landscape blurs together into a portrait of life on the fringe where money is tight but alcohol is ever present. They separate. They reunite. All while grappling with the violence ever present in their life. In this world, violence is enacted on Jamie and Bill enacts violence onto others. However, the resulting consequences are disastrous for all.

In Astragal the details of Sarrazin’s life bleed into the text. In some regards, one wishes for a straight memoir rather than fictionalized retelling.

Straight from the very first page, Sarrazin drops us into the action where we discover that our protagonist Anne has just jumped from at least 30 feet in a daring escape from prison. As a result of her fall, she breaks her talus bone and must crawl from the prison grounds to the highway where she is discovered by the blonde-haired convict Julien.*** It’s a wonderful meet-cute which alters the course of both their lives. Julien takes Anne in and pays for her recovery. The couple falls in love; we chart Anne’s passions but we also see how the couple is frequently separated by their shadowy pasts and criminal activities.

Both novels tackle the darkness within society and motifs of freedom and imprisonment are common in both. Yet, while Anne combats pimps and rogue friends, Angels is the only novel that truly looks into the void. In Angels our fugitives are all weighed down by a religiosity that permeates their physical and mental spaces. Allusions to faith and meaning and morality plague them all and it starts from the opening of the novel, when Jamie encounters nuns on the bus:

The characters’ relationship to God is a recurring theme in Angels which feels uniquely American. Mrs. Houston, Bill’s mother, recites Bible verses while visiting psychics and tarot readers; Bill’s youngest brother’s girlfriend Jeanine carries a “big heavy blue religious book” consisting of a “tangled gnostic catechism” that makes Mrs. Houston dizzy; and Bill’s younger brother James believes he belongs in Hell (Angels, p. 77).

There is no questioning of God in Astragal. Dare I say, there is no room for God in Sarrazin’s world, though the Doctor at the hospital who operates on Anne is referred to as God-the-Father. The honorific feels more like a bit than anything else. The closest thing to devotion in Anne’s world is her desire for Julien. His name is a prayer on her lips that sustains her as she says: “I never go hungry, but I have a thousand hungers on my mind, and the hunger for Julien which divides itself into a thousand desires, childish, astonishing, complex…” (Astragal, p. 127)

Anne also never questions if she is a bad person while Bill frequently worries this and Jamie begins to feel this way about the new found family she has taken up with: “Rather unexpectedly it occurred to her that her husband Curt, about whom she scarcely ever thought, had been a nice person. These people were not. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble: that whatever she did would be wrong” (Angels, pg. 110).

Putting aside, questions of faith, by the end of both novels, you nonetheless are left wondering when and where does redemption occur? Who is redeemable? And, finally, what price do you have to pay for sins?

There’s a lot more I’d like to say but this is getting rather long. 🙂 

Quotes I liked from Astragal:

• “Do I really want this man so much? He eases my idleness and pain, he is my joy, yes, but… If I were to hope for some other form of pleasure, would I have chosen him?” (Astragal, p. 79)

• “I don’t know if I still like women and despise men; but the man to like, the woman to despise, I know their names…Julien…but…I love you!… (Astragal, p. 103-105)

• “I hesitate: I haven’t filled my quota. I only have myself to account to, but I’m a rigorous self-employed woman.” (Astragal, p. 136)

• “I never liked sitting alone in a restaurant: here, as in Paris, I buy things wrapped in paper and eat them in bed, with a Kleenex for a tablecloth, while reading; raw things, things to be cooked that I don’t cook, hamburger covered with pepper, and pounds of fruit, washed down with instant coffee." When Julien comes back to me, if ever we live and eat together, I’ll fall back on my course in Household Management, I’ll make civilized meals, decorated, simmered; but Julien is in jail, I’m on the run and happiness is very far away.” (Astragal, p. 154)

  • Historical precedence of girl dinner!

On My Mind:

• Designer Sandy Liang’s wedding: Infused with the spirit of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and featuring cute bow detailing, a ceremony in Maine and at her family’s Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens. Plus, the the silk taffeta Ponyo dress! (Use Remove Paywell to read the article if you don’t want to give Vogue your email address.)

• Author Chelsea Hodson has launched The Rose Books, a new press devoted to publishing weird authors and I’m all for it. Big thanks to @bitterpurl for sharing the article on her stories and keeping me informed on fun things happening in publishing!!!!!

• Real Housewives of New York City: British-born Jessel Taank who worked at Karla Otto NY for at least three years told Erin Lichy that Tribeca is “up and coming” - I AM STILL REELING!!!!!!!

• Guns & Gulaabs is a new Netflix original show starring Rajkummar Rao. He, and Ayushmann Khurrana, are my two favorite South Asian actors. Already, I like the references to Guns N’ Roses and Sholay (1975). Will be watching the show this weekend, esp after it comes highly recommended by my sister who went to a screening of the show this week!!

  • Show premise: In the cartel-run town of Gulabgunj, an unprecedented opium deal pulls a big-city cop and a lovesick mechanic into its chaotic clutches.

*If you buy anything from these links, I will make no money b/c I have not figured out how to monetize things lol xoxo
**The Amazon India blurb describes Angels as an “odyssey of two losers” and I haven’t stopped thinking about that but couldn’t find a good way to fit that in earlier lol
***The talus bone in French is called astragale, hence the novel’s title
****Image credits: All from Pinterest except the image on the left is via Telsha Anderson’s IG and the image all the way on the right is from Prada’s FW23 Show