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Chris Adrian's "A Better Angel" Review

Frequent readers of this blog will know that I found Chris Adrian's short story collection "A Better Angel" to be one of the more fascinating short story collections of 2008. Which is why I decided to do an in-depth 2500-word review. In a reviewing culture that rarely gives space to short fiction, and space, when it is alloted, runs to a thousand words, I thought it important to spend a chunk of prose on the collection.

You can find the Chris Adrian review in the January issue of Open Letters.

Here's an excerpt from the middle:

A Better Angel isn’t exactly a new development on the themes of Adrian’s novels. Its nine stories were published over a decade, between 1997 and 2007, a time period that encompasses Gob’s Grief (2000) and The Children’s Hospital (2006). These stories originated alongside the novels and don’t break from them as much as suture new narratives together with familiar themes. All three books have strong commonalities: as well as the aforementioned angels, there’s an overlapping cast of characters (Dr. Snood, Pickie Beecher, Calvin, and Dr. Siri Chandra—an anagram of Chris Adrian), despair over dead brothers (often twin brothers), and a hospital’s worth of medical argot delivered with surgical snappiness (“Tell me the three classic findings on X-ray in necrotizing enterocolitis.”). If this seems rooted in autobiography, that’s because it is: Adrian has been a divinity student and pediatrician, and his brother died in a car accident in 1993.

Chris Adrian "A Better Angel" Reviews

Reviews are out for Chris Adrian's first short story collection, "A Better Angel." The Seattle Times, a two-paragraph blurb at Esquire, a thorough review at the San Francisco Chronicle, and lastly at the LA Times. It's this last review, by Lizzie Skurnick, which troubles me.

Skurnick's main complaint is that the children in "A Better Angel" seem to be acting older than their age. 8-year-olds don't read Thomas Merton or kill horses or recite Emily Dickinson.

She seems to have missed much of the collection. Some of the protagonists are teens. As far as the children, the point in many of these stories is that these children are possessed, either literally or metaphorically. And I do think there is a literary tradition of writing about precocious, odd children, children that aren't like other children, and aren't using "Cray-Pas" and blowing bubbles in their milk.

I knew one kid, son of a theologian, who knew Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew by the time he was seven and could argue esoteric points of doctrine with seminarians. I believe that it would be possible to represent him in fiction and make it believable. Precocious children should not be off limits in fiction.

Here's an excerpt from the review, where she's critiquing the short story "Stab":

Eventually, Calvin and Molly turn their sights on the sheriff. There is a grim physical humor in the thought of two 8-year-olds trip-tripping over the ice to lay murderous hands on the "false Santa" himself, but it's quite difficult to kill a grown person -- as Adrian, a pediatrician, should know.

Skurnick seems to be implying here that the two 8-year-olds did kill the "false Santa" while in fact, they tried very hard to kill him but failed. So the tut-tut finger-wagging ("shouldn't a pediatrician know that?") comes off as a bit uninformed. Did Skurnick read to the end of the story?

All in all, Skurnick's tone is too dismissive and snide, and "A Better Angel" deserves better attention, including your own.