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.

Injuries, Meaning, and Grafted Essays

If trying to understand our lives is this cloud, the hole where the light shines through is so often opened up by the injuries we experience along the way.

This the fourth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

As a writer, I find myself pulled between writing multi-voiced fictional stories and multi-concept literary essays. Another way to put it: I don’t make it easy on myself and writing is already difficult enough. 

But I am drawn to the narratives found in the spaces between people’s varied accounts of the same events or ideas. I also love when I find connection where there should be disjunction. Maybe it feels like meaning when there shouldn’t be any. Maybe that’s just faith found in another form.

Anyway, one of my creative projects over the sabbatical was planning a series of pieces I’m calling grafted essays that bring together injuries I’ve had over the years and a seemingly disconnected topic or concept. This form has been working its way to the surface of my aesthetic for a while now, as can be seen in this essay I wrote about a terrifying medical moment in my dad’s life and the way it intersected with a realization about my own role as a father.

The challenge of each of these pieces is connecting the reader with the ways in which my view of life is so often bound up in how I’ve been hurt…something I think is fundamentally true for all of us.

This work has been, surprisingly, enjoyable despite that fact that I am dredging up some physically painful experiences and casting a very wide net in looking for complimentary ideas that feel estranged from my personal stories while remaining connected in relevant ways in my head.

That last part is as confusing while I’m working as it was when you read it.

But the process has opened up some perspectives into how much I’m still carrying the injuries I thought I had walked off and how centrally my systems for making sense of the world run through the less-than-conscious remnants of those pains. This was the through line of an essay I wrote about the relative difference in thinking about my own childhood injuries and those of my children, which found a home at Punctuate Magazine.

So, I’ve been spending time in the middle of my most painful moments. The night I tore my ACL and the afternoon it was my hamstring. My bouts of depression and my more than 30 years of regular periods of severe insomnia. Losing my singing voice permanently at 19—which subsequently found print life in The Jabberwock Review—and greeting my 40s with a heart scare.

All of these bear on the way I see the world and move through it on a daily basis. The remnants of my pains—small and large, physical and psychic—are often the glass between me and my experiences, generally transparent but definitely impacting how I see what I think I’m looking at. And sometimes, the most surprising thoughts come when I take the time to look at the window rather than the view. 

Sometimes you have to see the dirt before you know what needs to be cleaned, and there’s nothing like writing to highlight where to starting scrubbing.