Word: angeles
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Angel Angel is told from the alternating points of view of Augusta and her two twentyish sons Mathew and Henry, aimless young men who want to rouse their mother out of her torpor but haven't the emotional strength. It will take an outsider to revive this troubled lot, and she arrives in the form of Bette Mack, a taciturn beauty in pink sneakers as drawn to the Irises as they are to her. Stevens surrounds Bette with an excess of winged imagery to indicate that she is the savior who will lift the Irises from their aggrieved inertia...
...early summer in a nameless Connecticut hamlet, and the Irises are wilting. Like the members of so many families who inhabit the world of contemporary fiction, those in the Iris clan are profoundly disconnected from one another. When we meet them in Angel Angel (Viking; 211 pages; $19.95), April Stevens' intelligent and moving first novel, they seem withered by their inability to achieve the closeness they yearn...
Emma most frequently plays the deceased member of the trio. Although in life she was a trial (like her husband), in death she became a perfect angel. It seems inevitable that Hardy would work this transformation on her behalf, given his rueful temperament. His poems are brooding, self-chiding. His life seems a variation on the biblical injunction that a man must lose himself to find himself. In Hardy's case, anything and everything had to be lost before its value could be found. He was a man for whom happiness was always just around the corner -- the corner...
...Mother and sisters made her ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again, seeing with grateful eyes the beautiful serenity that soon replaced the pathetic patience that had wrung their hearts so long, and feeling with reverent joy that to their darling death was a benignant angel, not a phantom full of dread...
Well, maybe not a witch, but some species of ethereal being. A dark angel, perhaps. Though at 23 Ryder is a prime icon of the post-teen set -- more than one writer has called twentysomethings the Winona Generation -- there is a quality in her dark, Walter Keane-eyed beauty that pulls her out of her time and into the crinolined past. No modern actress has her watchfulness, her fiery reticence, her gift of girlish blush and fluster. Nobody else even tries to monitor the intelligent, expectant heart beating in a virgin's breast. The true Ryder heroine is a gentle...