How Like an Angel: A Novel

by Jack Driscoll

" How Like an Angel is a powerfully imagined, lyrically wrought novel, overflowing with the senses. Jack Driscoll is a marvel."
---Rick Bass

" How Like an Angel is a lyrical, lonely ode to fatherhood, an aria in words that looks forward and backward at once. Jack Driscoll is a writer of deep heart, relentless honesty, uncanny gentleness, and irresistible spirit."
---Pam Houston


How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself.

In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son.

While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him.

With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds.

252 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 2005

Reviews

[Felicity]

I don't give star-ratings to books by my professors.

I read this book upon my acceptance into a program where the author teaches. I was trying to get an idea for the stuff each professor wrote, so I strayed outside my normal fare. I am not, as a rule, attracted to stories about fathers' and sons' relationships, recently divorced men, or, in fact, fishing. However, this book was luminous and beautifully written, full of lasting images and authentically human moments. It also managed to jump around in time without being confusing or affected. Basically, this book was so lovely I didn't really care what it was about, I just enjoyed it. That's some kind of magic.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to carve out time to write this review, and I can see, I'll want to read it again. I met the author Pacific University, and love that he is a poet as well as short story and fiction writer. The opening quotation from Larry Levis reminds me why I think everyone should read Jack Driscoll.
"Look. It's empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son".

And off the reader goes, understanding the author is going to get these characters through a ton of trouble... Whether you know it or not, you will love them by the end of the book.
Driscoll understands that the impulse to write comes from the same impulse to love. That in writing, it's not a question of reporting, but of relating...

So, start with a squall, harbinger of a divorce between a non-communicative, derogatory Dad who fixes dead people up for viewing; a smart but depressive, then cancer ridden mom, their son, and a family name, Angel. Mix in an ever rolling play of references, windows into these lives with a reminder from St. Augustine, “Every visible thing in this world put in charge of an angel” and Milton's and Paradise Lost;
"mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate:
At once, as far as Angels kenn, he views
The dismal Situation waste and wilde...

Angle in some jokes...
Go and catch a falling star – backwards...
(Star falling
a catch
and go)
and "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly..."

**
As I said, I finished the book, but then, realized I needed more time with it. A month later, the feeling has increased -- and that to me is the sign of a worthy book.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book over a year ago. I found an early edit copy in a bookstore in Uptown, MPLS and every little (teenage memory) bone in my body shivered with excitement to read this. The author was my favorite teacher from my high school years at Interlochen Arts Academy. This man is awesome. Huge crush. Always wears his sunglasses in class and a worn in baseball cap. We danced to James Taylor in class once. All this to say I had certain personal reasons for reading this novel. And I think these side notes kept me from feeling bound to finish it.

Only 50 pages in I slacked off and got side tracked- probably by the Biggest Loser, I'm not gonna lie. This is the internet; you can't lie here!- and the paperback ended up with the dust bunnies under my bed.

Found again after I started reading during my lunch hours at my boring job this spring and THANK GOD FOR THAT. Perfect timing. Driscoll, as the author- not just my old teacher, took me to Northern Michigan. Stream beds lined with smooth stones, roads lined with tall pines, snow banks and mosquitoes, dive bars and churches. All in my lunch break. A much needed respite.

I can't lie and say that I didn't picture the narrator to be Jack, himself. But I began to love him regardless: his midwestern man tendencies to feel through actions and not words. The evolution of his relationship with his son and his deceased father. The setting, a character to unabashedly fall in love with. I love a love story where the love isn't purely romantic.

This was a good entrance into a warm season of contemplation and relation.

[Cbricephd brice]

Stupendous! The most beautifully written novel I've read in years. You can tell that Driscoll was a poet before he became a novelest. The prose is poetry, but not overwritten. You never are aware of the writer's self-conscious use of lovely language; he makes it all seem so natural.
The story, too, is compelling. Jack is great with quirky characters (last year he won a pushcart for a short story about a married couple who were cat burglars). Here we have Archie Angel who's most valued possesion is the hurse his father handed down to him. It's an exciting novel.

[Renée · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about past and present lives intersecting. Driscoll has moments where he makes the back woods of Michigan alive with almost divine potential, other moments where the characters are so misguided it breaks your heart. Each chapter could stand alone as separate short stories, much like the books billed as novels in stories.