A Better Angel: Stories

by Chris Adrian

The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual of ways. In “Stab,” a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In “Why Antichrist?” a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent.

With Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice—of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.

 

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

227 pages, Hardcover

First published August 5, 2008

About the author

Chris Adrian was born in Washington D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he attended Harvard Divinity School, and is currently a pediatric fellow at UCSF. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. In 2010, he was chosen as one of the 20 best writers under 40 by The New Yorker.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Adrian is fascinating and inexplicable. He's got an MD, completed a pediatric residency, spent time at Harvard Divinity School, graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is currently working in pediatric hematology/oncology at UCSF, and just last year was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Damn. Somehow, during this time, he managed to write one short novel, bizarre and imperfect, one long novel, bizarre and less imperfect, and many stories, most of which are collected here. Dark dark dark stories of quiet suburban childhood nightmares and despairing hospital that keep alive suicidal patients while children die unexpectedly. It's in these, often, that you start to feel the hot black breath of perfection breathing on your neck from close behind.

So far, only the first story here falls short at all ("High Speeds", the oldest in the collection) and even then not by much. It's finely crafted and gripping, but a little trite. Isn't it agonizing to grow up miserable and too smart for your own good? I don't know, I wasn't smart enough, or miserable enough, or probably both, to really experience this first hand. But I keep reading others' accounts of it. Fortunately the subsequent stories range over much more unpredictable terrain. Fearless, ferocious writing.

[Cait · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god, I have found the modern day, male Flannery O'Connor! Dark, disturbing tone? The grotesque? Religious themes? Check, check, and check. With Adrian though, we have medicine instead of the South.
The man is a freaking genius. Seriously, go read his bio - it's insane.

I loved every single story in this collection and I can't wait to read The Children's Hospital.

[fatema ! · Rating 4 out of 5]

weird and creepy - basically a whole lot of illness, death, 9/11 references, and religious/angelic symbolism. glad i decided to check it out!! (even if it was originally bc the title reminded me of good omens 😭)
my favs were 'a child's book of sickness and death', and 'why antichrist?' :3

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This combines the author's experience as a paediatric clinician (much about illness, stories set in hospitals) with a taste for the afterlife (angels/prophecy) and an obsession with 9/11. In one story a boy 'sees' the forthcoming terrorist attack on the WTC, or rather 'becomes' one of the towers, people falling out of his hair; in another the teenage daughter of a 9/11 victim has sex while footage of the tragedy is projected on to the couple's naked bodies.
The whole quite a trip, weird and bloody, woozy with sickness and wrongness, characters knocked about by larger events and powers, illness interweaved with the everyday, knocking everything awry, including the reader.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is definitely some 4-star fiction in this collection, but some of these pieces felt more like (and might be) scenes cut from The Children's Hospital than free-standing, full-bodied stories. (When McSweeney's bought TCH's manuscript, it was 400 pp longer.) In a recent interview, Adrian admits to writing the same story over and over again--and to some extent, I think that's true for most writers; there are those particular questions we can't stop asking and investigating, and it's not like we can just answer them and move on. (Adrian's questions, it should be noted, are some of the most daunting--the problem of evil, the meaning of life, the power/responsibility of healing and its limitations, the inevitability of death, the impossibility of fully recovering from the death of a loved one.) However, after reading this whole collection and THC right in a row, I worry that he is circling these questions along a route that is becoming too familiar. The best of these stories ("Stab," "The Changeling") go deeper and further than this; they approach his damaged, bereaved characters from unexpected angles, surprising both them and us. Adrian is a fabulous prose stylist with a dark, playful imagination; he's anything but tongue-tied. And he's obviously brilliant; the guy is a pediatrician in divinity school. BUT--and this criticism applies to THC most of all--I'd argue that his work would be even better if he made more choices. It's not so much about killing darlings as recognizing when it's time to put them to bed.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a lover of short stories, I am forced to maintain a high tolerance for mediocrity to get through to the real gems. Thankfully this book popped up on the New Releases section in my library, because there isn't a clunker among the bunch. The stories, vastly original, are gripping and sometimes devastating pieces from a very individual writer.
This collection has a significantly unified tone, almost a subdued desperation blended with a wonderfully enabling innocence. It was rewarding to read it in one sitting, although I will definitely many of the stories again. The prose itself is fantastic, particularly sentences emanating from the characters inner voices.
I was also impressed by how well Adrian executed stories dealing with the September 11th terrorists attacks. One is highly fantastical, challenging, and charged with a potent moral about the destructive and uncontrollable power of violence and war. Another dealing directly with 9/11 (as does a third "The Antichrist), "The Changeling," was the most fascinating story and one of the best I have read all year, far better than almost all the stories in the 2008 Best American Short Stories collection (hint hint). In it, a father struggles to cope with his ill son's condition, a psychotic state akin to a demonic possession, and his mounting inability to cope is exhilarating.
I highly recommend this book, but reiterate that the tone is dark, and that some of the stories could justifiably be deemed gothic.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended on Thursday. Bought Thursday night. Read on Sunday, finished on Monday.
Done and dusted. A new author to follow.

I’m always especially intrigued by books written by physicians, envying them their overachieving capabilities. And look at the author photo on the back flap of the dust jacket. Such boyish good looks, such Mid-West clean-scrubbed open face and twinkling eyes. But his aw-shucks smile looks a bit sheepish. Perhaps because he can almost hear the reader’s disbelieving comment, “Wow, how can such a normal looking guy, a kid’s doc, write such twisted dark stuff!” And he’s a divinity student?!? No way! Just shows to go you, you never can tell…..

The first story, “High Speeds”, was the warning shot. The main character was, in his words, “in fourth grade and fucked up.” And he is. And so are those in the rest of the book. Seriously fucked up and often badly twisted.

“Stab” was the most powerful, a series of intense violent jabs that almost leaves you breathless at the end. It is tenderness in violence as healing.

“A Better Angel” was one of the best, about a bad drug-addicted doc who, overseen by his guardian angel, returns home to look after his dying father. It was funny, it was sad, it was pathetic, it was very human, and the angel can’t do much about that. The idea of an angel hanging around, pointing out prognostic info about people, was great. The doc can’t figure out what his angel has against the young children of his drug pusher, but “she has always done that, pointed out the ones that will grow into car thieves or lottery-fixers or murderers, as if I am supposed to smother them with the great pillow of righteous prevention when they are six months old.” No one is spared in the world of these short stories, certainly not doctors, and not even saintly hospice workers and child play therapists. Some of those bits are wickedly funny, as in this bit about his dying father’s hospice worker:

“ ‘You have to be ready at any time to have the conversation,’ Janie Finn told me, meaning the conversation where you sorted everything out and said your goodbyes, and the dying person sorted everything out and lost all their regrets. “You talk about things and then you let go,’ she said, making an expansive gesture with her hands, as if she were setting free a bunch of doves or balloons. It was just the sort of thing that hospice people always say, and it’s because they say things like this that I think they should all be put slowly to death, half of them ministering to the others as they expire by deadly injection, having their conversations and dwindling, half by half, until there are only two, and then one, and a little midget comes in and shoots the last one in the face.”

My favourite was “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death”. The main character is a teenage girl with a chronic gut syndrome who has had to be hospitalised many times over her life, and she is a hardened veteran of the system. And this combined with teenage-dom becomes a toxic mix of cynicism and venomous humour. The ‘cuteness’ of a kid is a currency that has to be used when you have it, and it has to work very hard. “It must extend itself to cover horrors — ostomies and scars and flipper-hands and harelips and agenesis of the eyeballs—“ The ‘tremendous faculty of cuteness generated from some organ deep within’ must cover the extra fingers, the bald spots, the yellow eyes, the bitter, nose-tickling odor of urine. She notes the areas of the kids’ hospital that are always replenished with new toys and new decor, because they get noticed by the rich people. “The nicest rooms are those that once were occupied by a privileged child with a fatal syndrome.”

Not a book for the squeamish, this is about as black as it gets.

[Nicky · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read The Children's Hospital (or some of it, anyway) with a book group, and somehow ended up wondering if maybe if I just tried something else of Chris Adrian's... Spoiler: don't. Well, don't if The Children's Hospital totally failed to work for you, anyway. I could've told you it was the same author without looking it up.

This review does a more even-handed job of analysing this than I would; suffice it to say that I, for my part, will not read anything else by Chris Adrian.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters in these stories are all uniquely and gloriously fucked up, in ways paralleling reality without ever quite being mistaken for real. If that makes sense. We see the Antichrist coming of age, a young girl with an escalating penchant for murder, an epidemic of linked hallucinations among the youth of a particular town, a boy possessed by spirits who only returns to his original self under grim circumstances. Each of these characters is both disturbed and disturbing in its own way, and all are pretty well done.

At its best, the writing is quirky and voicey and funny, a formula that is particularly unsettling and successful in these stories' darker moments. Here's what I mean:
"'I don't really go to parties,' I said, which was true. I didn't like to drink, and didn't like watching people get drunk, and the people I wanted to make out with were never the people who wanted to make out with me, and if I wanted to make some drunk girl cry then I could stay home and do that with my mother."

And this:
"My mother sometimes lost her temper and would scream out that I was a twisted little fruitcake and why couldn't I ever make anything easy? She always apologized later, but never with the same ferocity, and so it seemed to me not to count, and I always hoped she would burst into my room later on in the night, to wake me by screaming how sorry she was, to slap herself, and maybe me, too, because she was so regretful."

Last one, honest, this one from the first page of the opening story:
"In November of 1979 I'm four feet ten inches tall, and Papa has beendead for nine months. My little brother is crazy, and I want sometimes to take over the world."

Like that--funny and uncomfortable at the same time. I'm a fan.

There are two stories (that caught my eye, anyway) that incorporate blatant 9/11 references, although in ways that you don't really notice until they've been brought up a few times and details are slowly added until it clicks (hey, so that's why the thing with the planes... yeah, okay). In both cases, the event is handled as some distant, surreal thing--probably not even technically an event in one of them--and both stories are well done, but it strikes me as a heavily loaded real life event to fictionalize, immediately drawing heavier attention and scrutiny. I don't know what this means, but it was something I noticed.

Breakdown: "The Sum of Our Parts," "Stab," "The Vision of Peter Damien," and "The Changeling" stand out as probably the most memorable of the collection. I will also admit to a soft spot for "A Hero of Chickamauga" for the subject matter and use of the word "farb." When these stories are strong, they're pretty fantastic, albeit consistently dark--there are no rainbows here, and the only bunnies we see are dead ones.

[shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

this collection, like adrian's incredible novel "the children's hospital", mixes the religious impulse with contemporary high-tech medicine to great effect. the author conflates religion and medicine in an attempt, it seems, to understand what either is really about and how they can possibly coexist. over and over again, he puts a traditionally religious theme or occurrence into the realm of medicine and goes about showing how these once sacred or spiritual topics are processed by modern medicine. the premises of many of these stories are tremendously compelling -- a child who's possessed being dealt with as an "undiagnosed" psychiatric patient, a young man who gets visions being put on bed rest and administered to by doctors, a man who's been chosen by god as a healer unable to mentally handle the strain of working in a hospital. just watching the author build these situations is a pleasure to read. the drawback is that most of them seem to end in the middle of the story. few situations are resolved -- which, though it obviously speaks to the reader as an overall metaphor for the fact that the work of a hospital itself contains few resolutions, leaves one feeling unfulfilled again and again as each story ends before it should. adrian's two preceding novels are longer than most; i finished this book with the disappointed understanding that perhaps he's simply meant for long-form work. ultimately, if nothing else, this book is still enjoyable as a collection of sketches by a truly inventive author.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una raccolta di racconti interessante anche se a tratti urtante. I protagonisti sono per la gran parte adolescenti e bambini problematici perchè malati o traumatizzati. L’autore descrive con dovizia di particolari le psicopatologie e le angosce dei protagonisti rendendo palpabile il dolore e la disperazione che accompagna protagonisti e familiari. I giovani adulti protagonisti di alcuni racconti sembrano rappresentare la situazione di quei bimbi problematici che in qualche modo sono riusciti a superare il loro traumatico vissuto infantile che peró inevitabilmente torna a chiedere pegno. L’autore, oncologo pediatrico, ma anche teologo ci accompagna in un mondo di bambini costretti a crescere troppo in fretta, acuti e sorprendentemente intelligenti e maturi che cercano disperatamente di esorcizzare il loro dolore perdendosi in mondi paralleli o cercando attraverso la violenza di allontanare da loro quel dolore che li sta dilaniando.
Che dire... Chris Adrian è certamente un autore interessante che rende l’urgenza dei sentimenti raccontati palpabile e viva, ma forse, proprio per questo bisogna essere predisposti ad una prosa e soprattutto a delle tematiche così intimamente
toccanti.

[Monte · Rating 5 out of 5]

he author of Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital returns with a sublime collection of nine stories whose wide assortment of characters, many of them children, fugue around death, are plagued by remembrance of things past and are possessed by violence. In Stab, a young protagonist whose twin died, joins a little girl in a killing spree of neighborhood animals, eventually setting their sights on larger prey. A woman who tries to commit suicide in The Sum of Our Parts wanders hospital halls as an astral projection, witnessing the unexpressed desires of her friends in pathology. And a Juno-esque teen, a hospital regular with short-gut syndrome, writes an animal book of sublimated child-ward life: bunnies with high colonic ruin, cats with leukemic indecisiveness and monkeys with chronic kidney doom. The story Why Antichrist? gives us two teenagers who have each lost parents, one to 9/11 (which looms large in the collection); the devil is soon literally between the teens. With heartbreaking imagination, Adrian illuminates how people act out their grief on their own bodies and the bodies of others, and enter the world of the spirit in the process.

[Art · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a big fan of chris adrian's work, and this collection of short stories didn't let me down. Returning to themes and topics he explored in "Gob's Grief" and "The Children's Hospital" such as the violent and graceful management of grief, the death of brothers, the play of the fantastic in the frightening reality of the medical or very real- he doesn't repeat himself, but expands on earlier definitions and understandings, and makes a broader attempt at empathy and compassion for the forces outside and raging within his characters. the collection is pretty devastating, but moving, and it doesn't compromise or stoop to expectations. characters are bold and shameful, full, and their acts and also visions are up to interpretation and insight. i really liked this book, maybe you will too.

[Patrizia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visionario, forse a tratti crudele, è un libro che cattura e crea dipendenza. Arrivata all'ultima pagina, ho quasi sperato che durante la notte nuove storie nascessero da quelle appena concluse. La maggior parte dei racconti ruota intorno a bambini, la cui intelligenza è più condanna che dono. Bambini che affrontano, come possono e come sanno, malattia, dolore, speranza, abbandoni, una vita che non è certo dorata o indulgente. Ma nel loro viaggio attraverso distacchi spesso definitivi e verso la morte (protagonista muta, ma ingombrante), c'è anche tenerezza, solidarietà, senso della giustizia. Lo stile è asciutto, mai retorico, ma non distaccato. (Molto bella la traduzione, fluida, scorrevole).

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best of these stories ("The Changeling", "Stab", and especially "Why Antichrist?") are shocking, memorable, and affective, and even the ones that don't work as well are still quite well-crafted. I had a small issue with the recurrence of the "post-9/11 effects on a character", but even that can't detract much from the power of the book as a whole.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Adrian mixes theology and magic realism to create a unique style that I couldn't put down. I first read his story "Changling" in Esquire where it was originally published as "Promise Breaker" and it blew me away. When I picked up this book I found that it was one of many gems Adrian had produced over the years.

[Dr. Jon Pirtle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of stories from writer-doctor Chris Adrian. Reminded me a lot of Denis Johnson's fiction. Lots of surrealistic dream visions and hallucinations. Some of the stories were gruesome, too: murder, body parts that are misshapen and/or perverted into grotesqueries. Adrian's characters are like Holden Caulfield in that they sometimes seem to long for redemption and setting things aright but they harbor a lot of pleasure in just being snarky and sarcastic about the tragedy of how life is. They are bitter but too proud to change, so they are stuck.

[Alonzo Rangel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magical realism on hard mode. These stories are brutal, cryptic parables of death and violence in the modern world, obviously influenced by 9/11 and drawn from Adrian’s own experiences as a palliative care physician, as well as the death of his brother. The children’s voices are so mean-spirited but so so funny, really no one writes dying or grieving kids like Chris Adrian. I want to show John Green this book (with no shade to TFiOS.) Favorite stories: Stab, The Changeling, A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death, A Better Angel

[Sergio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris teaches us a lesson: you are going to die. MEMENTO MORI. It doesn't matter how fast you can run or how many friends you have, death awaits you and being alive is painful.
Stories surrounded by sorrow and pain, stories recommend for those who are tired of Mr Wonderful slogans: stories for those out there who are ready to accept that life isn't a fairytale.

[Scott Radway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed Adrian's writing. Interesting, unusual stories. I felt particularly moved by the title story and its ending. I could have done without the animal killings (I forget which story it was...also, warning: animal killings), but otherwise these are stories I would definitely re-read sometime.

[Adam Rodenberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

About two years ago, while doing some drunken book shopping with Surya at City Lights Books in North Beach, I stumbled across Chris Adrian's second novel, "The Children's Hospital," and was completely fascinated with the story. A kind of Noah's ark, but with a hospital and set in modern times. I wish I could say that I've completed the book, but I haven't...yet. It's fat and dense and completely interesting.

But my ever-changing, ever-adapting taste has moved to reading more short story collections at the moment since that's the kind of project I'm working on now. I started writing poetry in my younger days, moved to flash fiction, then right on into full novel-length manuscripts when I realized my poetry was pretty awful. So when I found myself, yet again, doing some drunken book shopping at City Lights, I stumbled across this collection of Adrian's that I'd never heard of before. I pulled it off the shelf, read the back, and immediately bought it.

Adrian is a bit of an odd duck; not only is he a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, but he is also a doctor now finishing up a pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the University of California in San Francisco. This is all to say, the guy is no slouch and his writing shows it. Even when he brings up a lot of medical terminology (which I have zero clue about), it feels natural and essential to the story rather than bogging down the text, which I appreciated immensely. The jargon added to the stories; it never hampered them.

I'm envious of Adrian's imagination; it's far out there and certainly pushes a few boundaries, much in the way I like to think my own writing aspires to do as well. While there was almost an overbearing relation to the events of 9/11 in some of the stories, I didn't seem to mind (even having just read DeLillo's "Falling Man" right before, itself an entire novel based around the events of that day eleven years ago).

Even with his obviously elevated educational pedigree, Adrian comes at the reader in a simple, but fantastic, way. It would be easy for him to slather on the thesaurus-worthy verbage or use entirely too large phrasing to make the same point, but he avoids this and it's to his credit. A 26-page story reads like a fraction of that length and still packs the right amount of punch. These stories ride that fine line between dark and twisted, never really venturing too far off to either side, but stradling each perfectly without the possibility of alienating the uninitiated reader.

What struck me the most about each story was the foil each main character seemed to have with them. In the title story, "A Better Angel," the son of a dying father is followed around by a kind of mythical conscience/guardian angel from an early age. She attempts to keep him on the "right" path, but as he ages and their relationship continues, she reveals that not all people with angels turn into good people. But she is always there, always playing against him and he against her.


"Yet awakening lust wasn't the problem, though eventually the lust that awakened made me a monster and a fiend, and I would waste, and still waste, half my life in thrall to it, screwing whoever would hold still for me in high school and forever beyond, to the exclusion of work and food and sleep, but never of drugs."


"The Sum of Our Parts" was an absolutely beautiful execution of moving from character to character to character and getting into each mindset before flowing into the next through action and dialogue. It's a technique I've always wanted to try myself and Adrian absolutely nails it through the interactions of hospital lab techs and their inner desires for each other. Imagine a room full of sexual tension where no one is attracted to the people they want attracted to them...all while under the supervision of a woman having an out of body experience, waiting to die.

Of all the stories in the collection, however, I think "The Changeling" had to be the most disturbing of them all. A son, a father, and a grandfather living in the same house. After an accident, the youngest son seems to be inhabited by a "chorus of voices" that bite at and snap at the father. What is an obvious story about demonic possession becomes a much deeper tug-and-pull until the final scene where the father proves to the demons inside his son exactly how far and how deep the love for his son actually is. I worried that I'd be turned off by this one, having seen or read about other possession/exorcism style stories, but I was hooked until the end. None of the standard cliched nonsense of floating beds or children puking or screaming at the caregivers, just flat out good storytelling with tension being heightened appropriately along the way.

These are just three of the stories that really stood out for me, but the entire collection is phenomenally solid. Had I not been on vacation when I started (and finished) it, there's a very good chance it would have taken me two days, tops, to finish. Adrian's prose style is fluid and truly moves across the page in a very readable, yet vibrant, way. This will be one I recommend to anyone looking for some new reading by someone they may have never heard of.

[Christopher Alonso · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange collection of story, and I enjoyed it so much. The stories are unsettling and imagistic, and if this is what Adrian can do in a compressed space, I look forward to how his language can explode in longer form.

[Renny Gong]

From this collection, I read the short story "Stab," which begins "Someone was murdering the small animals of our neighborhood." I really liked it. The characters made a lot of sense to me, and the ending got me, made me feel really sad. 5 stars.

[Lisa Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendously touching. The mastery of language is epic.

[Chaitra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very weird. In a good way. I only didn’t like the second story, The Sum of Our Parts, but even that one had its moments. But I sure don’t want Chris Adrian to be my son’s pediatrician.

[m. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read: "Why Antichrist?"

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended to me by the same person who turned me onto George Saunders years ago. Daring, unique and well-written stories backlit by 9/11, the unfairness of life and ambivalent sexuality.

[Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird in all the right ways. Each short story was a perfect length that left me wanting more, but not in a way that was frustrating.

[Leslie Ann Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

In telling these stories the thread of a shared trauma weaves it's way through our collective memories and brings an odd familiarity or recognition even while exploring the fantastic.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death
By Chris Adrian