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lee_foust 's review for:
Black Wings Has My Angel
by Elliott Chaze
While I live and work in Florence, Italy, I usually spend my summers in San Francisco. This summer, due to the global pandemic, however, here I am sitting on my Florentine balcony sipping ice coffee and enjoying the limpid blue sky and the 90 degree heat. Imagine my surprise and nostalgia when I pick up Black Wings Has my Angel and discover it to be one of the most American novels I've ever read, maybe even the American novel par excellence.
It's all here, folks, the best, most biting noir evocation of our ridiculously empty materialist culture, the one that drives us to make life an endless back-biting scramble to make (or steal--same thing) a million and then the inevitable disillusion when those of us who succeed realize that there's no good way to spend such wealth, that it only breeds moral sickness and utter aimless decadence. America is an idea equally destroyed by the horrors of pursuing wealth or obtaining wealth and this little old pulp novel from a Southern journalist is the best, most tragic narrative I have yet read regarding that fact. Pure gold.
Ok, it's not as brilliant or pithy or literary as William Gaddis's JR, but the very fact of its trashiness actually makes it even more American, and maybe even more satisfying to read than that much more obviously brilliant paean to the stars and stripes. There are some great metaphors and motifs here for the literary-minded as well--gold mining, bathing and cleanliness vs. the stain of guilt and murder à la Lady MacBeth, as well as the classic dichotomy in the American imagination regarding the decadent city vs. the humble hometown. Damn, it's good. True and perspicacious.
It even--in this time of protest and unmarked militarized Gestapo-esque presidential cops on the streets of Portland--presents our police for what they are, thuggish psychopaths. If you want to know why we should defund the police, all you have to do is read a noir, any noir, for the police are always portrayed this way in them. Even in the ones in which the cops are the protagonists--like a Mickey Spillane--they are shown to be the sadistic bastards that they so often are. At least the crooks are driven by the American dream, all of the cops' violence comes from a place of pure joy in inflicting pain: they're always bad guys in streetwise American fiction, even when they are the good guys.
And, best of all here, are the characters. "The Pure products of America," wrote poet William Carlos Williams, "go mad." These people are mad alternately with the lust for wealth and the effects of wealth. They have completely internalized this sorrow; they hate both themselves and each other for the pursuit and consumption of money. I guess this is why Selby uses drug addiction as his metaphor for the American Dream in Requiem for a Dream, for the junkie is similarly afflict with self-loathing.
So, I'm enjoying my summer in Florence, I guess, but this novel made me homesick--accent on the sick part.
It's all here, folks, the best, most biting noir evocation of our ridiculously empty materialist culture, the one that drives us to make life an endless back-biting scramble to make (or steal--same thing) a million and then the inevitable disillusion when those of us who succeed realize that there's no good way to spend such wealth, that it only breeds moral sickness and utter aimless decadence. America is an idea equally destroyed by the horrors of pursuing wealth or obtaining wealth and this little old pulp novel from a Southern journalist is the best, most tragic narrative I have yet read regarding that fact. Pure gold.
Ok, it's not as brilliant or pithy or literary as William Gaddis's JR, but the very fact of its trashiness actually makes it even more American, and maybe even more satisfying to read than that much more obviously brilliant paean to the stars and stripes. There are some great metaphors and motifs here for the literary-minded as well--gold mining, bathing and cleanliness vs. the stain of guilt and murder à la Lady MacBeth, as well as the classic dichotomy in the American imagination regarding the decadent city vs. the humble hometown. Damn, it's good. True and perspicacious.
It even--in this time of protest and unmarked militarized Gestapo-esque presidential cops on the streets of Portland--presents our police for what they are, thuggish psychopaths. If you want to know why we should defund the police, all you have to do is read a noir, any noir, for the police are always portrayed this way in them. Even in the ones in which the cops are the protagonists--like a Mickey Spillane--they are shown to be the sadistic bastards that they so often are. At least the crooks are driven by the American dream, all of the cops' violence comes from a place of pure joy in inflicting pain: they're always bad guys in streetwise American fiction, even when they are the good guys.
And, best of all here, are the characters. "The Pure products of America," wrote poet William Carlos Williams, "go mad." These people are mad alternately with the lust for wealth and the effects of wealth. They have completely internalized this sorrow; they hate both themselves and each other for the pursuit and consumption of money. I guess this is why Selby uses drug addiction as his metaphor for the American Dream in Requiem for a Dream, for the junkie is similarly afflict with self-loathing.
So, I'm enjoying my summer in Florence, I guess, but this novel made me homesick--accent on the sick part.