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Angel Strings
A road-trip book for the 90s, a westward journey through the surreal landscape of the postmodern world.
300 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
16 people want to read
About the author
Gary Eberle
8 books2 followersGary Eberle, MA, professor of English at Aquinas College, is the author of several books, including The Geography of Nowhere: Finding One's Self in the Postmodern World (Sheed & Ward, 1994); Angel Strings, a novel (Coffee House Press, 1995); A City Full of Rain, short stories (Xlibris, 2001), and Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning (Shambhala, 2003). His newest book is Dangerous Words: Talking About God in the Age of Fundamentalism (Boston: Shambhala/Trumpter, 2007).
Eberle has twice been selected by the Student Senate as Outstanding faculty member of the year, and in 1994 he received an award from the Aquinas College faculty for outstanding scholarship. He developed the Insignis Program for Honors Students in 1985 and directed it for 12 years. His journalism and fiction have won awards locally and nationally, and his novel Angel Strings was named a “best book” by the New York Public Library in 1997. Active professionally, he has been president of the Mid-East Honors Association, the Michigan Honors Association, and has been an officer of the Michigan Association of Departments of English. A more extensive biography and critical notes may be found in the on-line version of Contemporary Authors.
Eberle has twice been selected by the Student Senate as Outstanding faculty member of the year, and in 1994 he received an award from the Aquinas College faculty for outstanding scholarship. He developed the Insignis Program for Honors Students in 1985 and directed it for 12 years. His journalism and fiction have won awards locally and nationally, and his novel Angel Strings was named a “best book” by the New York Public Library in 1997. Active professionally, he has been president of the Mid-East Honors Association, the Michigan Honors Association, and has been an officer of the Michigan Association of Departments of English. A more extensive biography and critical notes may be found in the on-line version of Contemporary Authors.
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January 9, 2011
Review: Angel Strings: A Road Trip Novel in a Geography of Nowhere?
There may be more to the title than meets the eye—that or perhaps I was indoctrinated by my English Literature program a little too well. What does “Angel Strings” refer to? At first sight, the Angel Strings refers to the guitar that the protagonist, a Mr. Joe Findlay (aka Stupid), picks up from Grandpa Tolliver. Joe Findlay is the son a magician, and if there is one thing his childhood has taught him, it's that there is no real magic in the world. Just strings that make people believe there is magic. Yet, throughout the novel, we meet people who are desperate to believe that there is real magic in the world. So who is pulling the strings? It could be the Angels. The other way we might interpret the angels is as a marketing gimmick. When Joe mentions to his father that he has been seeing angels on his trip, his father responds something to the effect of: that's great that will sell lots of records.
But we as an audience, I think, are meant to believe that: yes, there are Angels in the world, and yes, there is more than meets the eye. This is the transformation that Joe supposedly goes through as well. In a sense, then, is the novel any better than the New Age garbage that we meet throughout the book. The answer is yes—because the book deals honestly with pain.
More than anything the book is a fun road trip book with a cast of characters that grows as the novel roles on. This book is probably best read at a point when you might be feeling completely lost in your life. It's also a great book if you're in the mood for a road trip book. I have had the pleasure of reading at least two great road trip books before ever reading Jack Kerouac (I promise to get to one of his books at some point). I have to give a quick nod to Lance Carbuncle's “Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed” which is also another amazing road trip book. Like Lance's book, Angel String also shows quite a bit of sympathy for the down and out, the lonely, depressed, and oppressed. It's this sympathy and compassion that makes the book stand for something more than just an the odyssey of a backup guitarist, Rahu the French Fry-eating Tibetan monk, a hippy with Unicorn Power, and a hillbilly girl with a baby in a box.
he other road trip book I had in mind is actually The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which probably needs no introduction). In some parts the books humor rivals that of Adams'. In chapter 6, the narrator sums up his odyssey in this way: “In the week or so since I had picked up Violet, I had crossed three time zones, tried to call down UFOs with a bunch of pagans, got hooked up with a midget preacher, almost got shot, killed, and arrested, had picked up a Tibetan lama, and seen a Bird Boy Flying sixty miles an hour through the desert” (233). There is a sense in the book that the universe has a way of happening to us that is no way planned out or rational, or at the very least rational in a way that was never really planned out (except perhaps by super-intelligent mice, but I digress).
Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think there are enough outrageous road trip books out there at the moment. As my brother once said, I wish there were more movies with monkeys as side kicks (he remembered the Clint Eastwood movie that had a monkey as a sidekick). That's sort of how I feel about road trip novels. (Warning: There are no monkeys as sidekicks in this novel).
The book reminds me a lot of 1995. The main character is a backup guitarist working in Las Vegas, yet he somehow thinks that he is meant for fame and fortune. As a product of the 1990s, observing other products of the 1990s, I know this feeling all too well—the feeling that somehow you're meant for fortune and glory (of course without having to work or sacrifice for it in any meaningful sense). Perhaps it was MTV and a plethora of movies (Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventure, if I could be so crass) that instilled in us a faith in glory without talent and hard work. If anything, reality TV has probably kicked this feeling into overdrive—but here I'm getting into unfamiliar territory. I won't pretend to know the soul of the newest generation. Their disillusionment I think will be nothing compared to the 90s generation. Nevertheless, there is heart and humanity in this book that I think will transcend age groups, if not any final answers the way a guru might proscribe.
I also loved how the book moved geographically (after all, the writer also wrote a book called “The Geography of Nowhere: Losing Oneself in the Postmodern World”, so I have to at least get in some geographical commentary). The author does a wonderful job of bringing the various places of the US to life, from the factories and slums of Detroit, to the backwater joints of Porksville, to the dry deserts of Nevada. I haven't read the author's other book about Geography, but one of the seminal ideas of postmodern geography is that space is being substituted for time—that everyplace is becoming closer to everyplace, and that difference is being colonized by homogeneity (anywhere you go you can buy a Coke and eat at McDonalds). For Joe, the main character, the one place he feels most at piece is when he is in the in-between spaces. When he is driving at night and the darkness and silence envelop him. I think this is a sensation that many of us can empathize with—the idea that the world is becoming too close, too loud, and yet that the closer we get to others the lonelier we feel. The best scene in the book is where we see Joe driving his van next to a train that is going parallel. The message, as simply as it can be read, is that we run parallel to others on tracks briefly for a time and then the moment is gone.
Why do we hit the road, face the loneliness of vast space, meet troublesome characters and face great dangers? The book has a few answers. So we don't have to be married to people we hate, so we don't have to pretend to be someone we're not in order to earn money, to avoid a life of mediocrity. These are all good reasons to take off on a road trip. In the end though—the open road, as a geography of nowhere (no obligations, no responsibilities)--isn't an ending. It's not a life. It's an in between, something to help us bridge the impossible now with the not so bad future. In the case of Angel Strings it's about the journey, but the destination isn't so bad either.
***********
Interview with Gary Eberle
I recently had the chance to read an amazing book by Gary Eberle--Angel Strings. After reading the book, Mr. Eberle was kind enough to answer a few of my questions. In addition to Angel Strings (Coffee House Press, 1995), he has also published several nonfiction books: Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning (Shambhala 2003), Dangerous Words, Talking About God in an Age of Fundamentalism (Shambhala/Trumpeter 2007). He has also published one short story collection A City Full of Rain (2001).
Angel Strings follows Joe Findlay, a down and out backup guitar player and son of a professional magician. Joe takes to the road to try to find his place in the world. After months of playing dingy bars, he meets Violet Tansy, a teenage girl who caries a baby in a box who needs to get to San Diego. Their journey takes them through a landscape of neo-Pagans, Detroit slums, mini-malls, and Munchee Marts. As I finished the book I wanted to know more about the role of geography in Eberle's novel, what the relationship was between him and his main character, and different influences Eberle saw in his book. Here is how he answered.
What role do you think place and geography play in your novel?
Place and geography were important. The beginning in Northwest Ohio was important, personally, because that's where I am from. After that, the spine of the novel unfolded through an America that was mainly horizontal--the Great Plains. The joke was that Joe and Violet would drive and drive and then end up at another strip mall freeway exit that looked exactly like the one they had been at several hours before. I-80 became an East-West Mississippi River in the more or less implicit allusions to Huck Finn. I have driven across the country a couple of times and am always disappointed in how much it is the same, culturally, from coast to coast. We have no places anymore, in the sense of cultural geography.
In what way would you compare Joe Findlay's experiences as a musician with your own as a novelist?
Since Angel Strings is my only novel so far, we're similar in that Joe had only one hit. But other than that, I have been a musician myself and the idea of schlepping your act around from bar to bar or your book from book group to book group is roughly the same. At a bar, most people are there for the drinks. At the book clubs, they're mostly there for the chardonnay. The act, the book, or the writer are simply the excuse people use to get together. I hope that's not too cynical, but it's been my experience with all of my books. Few people have time to read deeply anymore, so I have had the experience of working for years on a piece of writing and then finding out that a reader spent a few hours with it then went on to the next novelty. I will be retiring in a few years and hope to get back to writing more fiction. In the interim, I have published non-fiction books.
What other books would you like to see your novel compared with? Was there a certain tradition of novels you were trying to follow? Were there some books in particular that influenced your writing?
In Angel Strings, I was obviously playing with Magical Realism. I wanted to see if I could do, in the American landscape, what Garcia Marquez does in the steamy jungles of Colombia. In the relentless banality of modern American life, can we find a bit of magic? My interest in comparative mythology and religions came to bear as well, so I suppose Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Bible are lurking in the background as well. In some ways, I was also responding to Beckett-style modernism, trying to find God in a godless culture that is lashing about trying to find something spiritual in a landscape of Munchee Marts.
Thanks for reading this interview. I proper review of the book should be coming soon.
There may be more to the title than meets the eye—that or perhaps I was indoctrinated by my English Literature program a little too well. What does “Angel Strings” refer to? At first sight, the Angel Strings refers to the guitar that the protagonist, a Mr. Joe Findlay (aka Stupid), picks up from Grandpa Tolliver. Joe Findlay is the son a magician, and if there is one thing his childhood has taught him, it's that there is no real magic in the world. Just strings that make people believe there is magic. Yet, throughout the novel, we meet people who are desperate to believe that there is real magic in the world. So who is pulling the strings? It could be the Angels. The other way we might interpret the angels is as a marketing gimmick. When Joe mentions to his father that he has been seeing angels on his trip, his father responds something to the effect of: that's great that will sell lots of records.
But we as an audience, I think, are meant to believe that: yes, there are Angels in the world, and yes, there is more than meets the eye. This is the transformation that Joe supposedly goes through as well. In a sense, then, is the novel any better than the New Age garbage that we meet throughout the book. The answer is yes—because the book deals honestly with pain.
More than anything the book is a fun road trip book with a cast of characters that grows as the novel roles on. This book is probably best read at a point when you might be feeling completely lost in your life. It's also a great book if you're in the mood for a road trip book. I have had the pleasure of reading at least two great road trip books before ever reading Jack Kerouac (I promise to get to one of his books at some point). I have to give a quick nod to Lance Carbuncle's “Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed” which is also another amazing road trip book. Like Lance's book, Angel String also shows quite a bit of sympathy for the down and out, the lonely, depressed, and oppressed. It's this sympathy and compassion that makes the book stand for something more than just an the odyssey of a backup guitarist, Rahu the French Fry-eating Tibetan monk, a hippy with Unicorn Power, and a hillbilly girl with a baby in a box.
he other road trip book I had in mind is actually The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which probably needs no introduction). In some parts the books humor rivals that of Adams'. In chapter 6, the narrator sums up his odyssey in this way: “In the week or so since I had picked up Violet, I had crossed three time zones, tried to call down UFOs with a bunch of pagans, got hooked up with a midget preacher, almost got shot, killed, and arrested, had picked up a Tibetan lama, and seen a Bird Boy Flying sixty miles an hour through the desert” (233). There is a sense in the book that the universe has a way of happening to us that is no way planned out or rational, or at the very least rational in a way that was never really planned out (except perhaps by super-intelligent mice, but I digress).
Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think there are enough outrageous road trip books out there at the moment. As my brother once said, I wish there were more movies with monkeys as side kicks (he remembered the Clint Eastwood movie that had a monkey as a sidekick). That's sort of how I feel about road trip novels. (Warning: There are no monkeys as sidekicks in this novel).
The book reminds me a lot of 1995. The main character is a backup guitarist working in Las Vegas, yet he somehow thinks that he is meant for fame and fortune. As a product of the 1990s, observing other products of the 1990s, I know this feeling all too well—the feeling that somehow you're meant for fortune and glory (of course without having to work or sacrifice for it in any meaningful sense). Perhaps it was MTV and a plethora of movies (Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventure, if I could be so crass) that instilled in us a faith in glory without talent and hard work. If anything, reality TV has probably kicked this feeling into overdrive—but here I'm getting into unfamiliar territory. I won't pretend to know the soul of the newest generation. Their disillusionment I think will be nothing compared to the 90s generation. Nevertheless, there is heart and humanity in this book that I think will transcend age groups, if not any final answers the way a guru might proscribe.
I also loved how the book moved geographically (after all, the writer also wrote a book called “The Geography of Nowhere: Losing Oneself in the Postmodern World”, so I have to at least get in some geographical commentary). The author does a wonderful job of bringing the various places of the US to life, from the factories and slums of Detroit, to the backwater joints of Porksville, to the dry deserts of Nevada. I haven't read the author's other book about Geography, but one of the seminal ideas of postmodern geography is that space is being substituted for time—that everyplace is becoming closer to everyplace, and that difference is being colonized by homogeneity (anywhere you go you can buy a Coke and eat at McDonalds). For Joe, the main character, the one place he feels most at piece is when he is in the in-between spaces. When he is driving at night and the darkness and silence envelop him. I think this is a sensation that many of us can empathize with—the idea that the world is becoming too close, too loud, and yet that the closer we get to others the lonelier we feel. The best scene in the book is where we see Joe driving his van next to a train that is going parallel. The message, as simply as it can be read, is that we run parallel to others on tracks briefly for a time and then the moment is gone.
Why do we hit the road, face the loneliness of vast space, meet troublesome characters and face great dangers? The book has a few answers. So we don't have to be married to people we hate, so we don't have to pretend to be someone we're not in order to earn money, to avoid a life of mediocrity. These are all good reasons to take off on a road trip. In the end though—the open road, as a geography of nowhere (no obligations, no responsibilities)--isn't an ending. It's not a life. It's an in between, something to help us bridge the impossible now with the not so bad future. In the case of Angel Strings it's about the journey, but the destination isn't so bad either.
***********
Interview with Gary Eberle
I recently had the chance to read an amazing book by Gary Eberle--Angel Strings. After reading the book, Mr. Eberle was kind enough to answer a few of my questions. In addition to Angel Strings (Coffee House Press, 1995), he has also published several nonfiction books: Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning (Shambhala 2003), Dangerous Words, Talking About God in an Age of Fundamentalism (Shambhala/Trumpeter 2007). He has also published one short story collection A City Full of Rain (2001).
Angel Strings follows Joe Findlay, a down and out backup guitar player and son of a professional magician. Joe takes to the road to try to find his place in the world. After months of playing dingy bars, he meets Violet Tansy, a teenage girl who caries a baby in a box who needs to get to San Diego. Their journey takes them through a landscape of neo-Pagans, Detroit slums, mini-malls, and Munchee Marts. As I finished the book I wanted to know more about the role of geography in Eberle's novel, what the relationship was between him and his main character, and different influences Eberle saw in his book. Here is how he answered.
What role do you think place and geography play in your novel?
Place and geography were important. The beginning in Northwest Ohio was important, personally, because that's where I am from. After that, the spine of the novel unfolded through an America that was mainly horizontal--the Great Plains. The joke was that Joe and Violet would drive and drive and then end up at another strip mall freeway exit that looked exactly like the one they had been at several hours before. I-80 became an East-West Mississippi River in the more or less implicit allusions to Huck Finn. I have driven across the country a couple of times and am always disappointed in how much it is the same, culturally, from coast to coast. We have no places anymore, in the sense of cultural geography.
In what way would you compare Joe Findlay's experiences as a musician with your own as a novelist?
Since Angel Strings is my only novel so far, we're similar in that Joe had only one hit. But other than that, I have been a musician myself and the idea of schlepping your act around from bar to bar or your book from book group to book group is roughly the same. At a bar, most people are there for the drinks. At the book clubs, they're mostly there for the chardonnay. The act, the book, or the writer are simply the excuse people use to get together. I hope that's not too cynical, but it's been my experience with all of my books. Few people have time to read deeply anymore, so I have had the experience of working for years on a piece of writing and then finding out that a reader spent a few hours with it then went on to the next novelty. I will be retiring in a few years and hope to get back to writing more fiction. In the interim, I have published non-fiction books.
What other books would you like to see your novel compared with? Was there a certain tradition of novels you were trying to follow? Were there some books in particular that influenced your writing?
In Angel Strings, I was obviously playing with Magical Realism. I wanted to see if I could do, in the American landscape, what Garcia Marquez does in the steamy jungles of Colombia. In the relentless banality of modern American life, can we find a bit of magic? My interest in comparative mythology and religions came to bear as well, so I suppose Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Bible are lurking in the background as well. In some ways, I was also responding to Beckett-style modernism, trying to find God in a godless culture that is lashing about trying to find something spiritual in a landscape of Munchee Marts.
Thanks for reading this interview. I proper review of the book should be coming soon.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 21, 2007
This is one of my favorite books ever. A man in his mid life decides he can no longer live with mediocrity and embarks on a journey that is strange and wonderful. Anything more would give away too much.
November 25, 2007
my English professor wrote this book!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews