Talk:Some Angry Angel: A Mid-Century Faerie Tale

'In italics in the book' - is that the whole poem, or, possibly, just the last line? Ro Thorpe 21:54, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

It was the footnote reference that created that stoopid half-line break between the two lines. I've now fixed it in various ways. I had already noticed this, but thanks for pointing it out again. Be glad, very glad, that we don't have angels throwin' stuff at us! The protagonist comes to a bad end in the very last line.... Hayford Peirce 22:54, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Ah, that's better! (Not the protagonist's end...) Ro Thorpe 00:30, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Time Magazine review

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826184,00.html Books: Mixed Fiction, March 28, 1960

SOME ANGRY ANGEL, by Richard Condon (275 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $4.50), marks the third appearance of an ironist whose iron holds a keener edge than most. After his fine, mordant first novel. The Oldest Confession, he did a few handstands to attract attention, and the result was The Manchurian Candidate (TIME, July 6). an impressively comic but chaotic novel whose message—all is vanity and venality, and even the noblest of men knows not the way to the washroom—was not always audible over the author's sousaphone accompaniment. The present book appears to contain the same admonition, though this is by no means certain. The satirist's voice is heard, but the words are indistinct. Worse, the Katzenjammer that muffles it is not Condon's funniest. The book's hero is Daniel Tiamat, an Irish-American newspaperman (his name is that of a doomed deity, the mother of the gods in Babylonian mythology). The book tells how Tiamat arrives at young manhood in full vigor of mind and body, with a crapshooter's wrist, moral faculties unblunted by use, and a more than Hearstian knowledge of what makes news paper readers salivate. By middle age he is reduced to physical paralysis and the ignominy of writing an agony column un der the pseudonym of Miss Friendship (clearly a fictional cousin of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts). Tiamat marries the editor's daughter, who, like all of the author's women, is impossibly beautiful, strong, passionate, lov ing and wise (for instance, she knows that as miners get silicosis. matadors are gored and fishermen drowned, so news papermen get drunk). Despite her virtues Tiamat takes a mistress. Since this is a fable of corruption, his enraged father-in-law offers him two choices : quit the paper, or incur certain moral leprosy by becoming a columnist. The scapegrace journalist chooses to lose his soul, and the author to misplace both humor and control of his figures of speech. "While it dipped its pen in its readers' blood." he preaches, "the newspaper industry mumbled on about its sacred right, freedom of the press, and then gutted that right." To Condon fans, the book's redeeming feature will be some grimly comic episodes: the concessionaire who, as crowds watch a would-be suicide, does a brisk business in "JUMP" and "DON'T JUMP" signs; or the drunken and thoroughly fraudulent hero of the Battle of Britain who solemnly praises "the little people" of England, as if he had not seen "a single Britisher who stood over two feet nine inches."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826184,00.html#ixzz0lgQpNPXe

NYT review

Hunger for Celebrity, by Quentin Reynolds. NYT, March 20, 1960, at http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F70917FD39541A7A93C2AB1788D85F448685F9

Once again Richard Condon has proved that his typewriter generates brilliant sparks each time he plays it.... Like most of Condon's characters, Dan Tiamat carries the seeds of his own destruction. To describe his rise and fall in capsule form is virtually impossible: it is reminiscent of both the late Nathaniel West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," and Budd Schulberg's "What Makes Sammy Run?"

This reviewer happens to be a charter member of the Richard Condon cult -- a fast-growing group. It is his considered opinion that Dan Tiamat is one of the most extraordinary characters in modern fiction -- and that "Some Angry Angel" is one of the most extraordinary books of the year.