Books — House of Broken Angels

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

The House of Broken Angels

Luis Alberto Urrea, Back Bay Books (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Urrea’s website here.

I’ve been a fan of Luis Urrea‘s work since someone handed me his book Beside the Lake of Sleeping Children almost a decade ago. His prose, both in fiction and nonfiction, is so spare and precise without losing its emotional energy.

Urrea has a way of using the sequence of his details to carry the sense of a moment, whether in scene or dialogue, that is powerful in its unassuming form. He leaves the reader to sit with what’s what’s just been revealed on the page and also prompts us to explore what they make of where it takes us off of it. The effect allows his stories to feel strangely familiar even when the circumstances are not.

This is a key to the deeply moving story at the core of his novel The House of Broken Angels, a multi-perspective rumination on family and belonging and the endings that inevitably follow beginnings.

The basic premise of the book revolves around the funeral of Big Angel’s mother and the last birthday party he will ever have, both of which happen within a few days of each other. The two events bring Angel’s extended family together at his East County San Diego home where all of them wrestle with where life has taken them and how it will, inevitably, give way to something else in death.

Swirling around Big Angel—who until his cancer became advanced was the loud, decision-making patriarch of the clan—his children and siblings try to honor his wishes for one more party and chance at reconciliation for all the ways life has estranged and bound them together at the same time.

In everyone else, the patterns of life and family unwind in new generations while the members of Angel’s ponder slipping into the roles of the elderly, some clinging to their youth while others succumb to the persistent erosions of time. This reminded me quite a bit of the dynamic of Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy  in which the characters who attend the titular Billy’s wake construct themselves in the same moments they build an increasingly complex portrait of him. 

And in it all, Big Angel tries to understand what he is about to give up in death; to evaluate whether or not he has truly lived and lived well. This rumination ends in a single moment when he is able, in his weakened way, to act one last time as the father figure so many in the family still needed.

“And that was it for Big Angel. The string was cut. He felt and saw sparks rise around him. Now he knew why he was not dead yet. The sparks whirled. He thought he had stayed alive to enjoy his own wake. He thought he was still alive to make amends. He thought he was still alive to try one last hour to unite his family. But now he knew. What a pretty little tornado of light” (306).

The House of Broken Angels, then, is a novel about the living we do when we know that dying will come, not in the abstract but the tangible. And in this space, Urrea challenges readers to ask the same questions of themselves they find his characters asking.

This, I believe, is a gift.