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Overview
In April 1991, in a little Wisconsin town about a hundred miles southwest of the town where I grew up, a misfit boy was kidnapped by a group of high school kids who, later, would testify they'd merely meant to frighten him, to drive him around for a while. Somehow they ended up at the rive, whooping and hollering on a two-lane bridge. Somehow the boy was shoved, he jumped, he slipped—acounts vary—into the icy water. The kids told police they never heard a splash; one reported seeing a brilliant flash of light. (Several people in the area witnessed a similar light, while others recalled hearing something "kind of like thunder.") All night, volunteers walked the river's edge, but it was dawn before the body was found in a barn a good mile from the bridge . . .
The owner of the barn had been the one to discover the body, and she said the boy's cheeks were rosy, his skin warm to the touch. A sweet smell hung in the air. "It was," she said "as if he were just sleeping." And then she told police she believed an angel had carried him there.
For years, it had been said that an angel lived in the river. Residents flipped coins into the water for luck, and a few claimed they had seen the angel, or known someone who'd seen it. The historical society downtown had a farmwife's journal, dated 1898, in which a woman described how an angel had rescued her family from a flood. Now, as the story of the boy's death spread, more people came forward with accounts of strange things that had happened on that night. Dogs had barked without ceasing till dawn; livestock broke free of padlocked barns. Someone's child crayoned a bridge and, above it, a wide-winged tapioca angel.
A miracle? A hoax? Or something in between? With acute insight and great compassion, A. Manette Ansay captures the inner life of a town and its residents struggling to forge a new identity in the face of a rapidly changing world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780380729746 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 03/09/1999 |
| Series: | Quill |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
A. Manette Ansay is the author of eight books, including Vinegar Hill, Midnight Champagne (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Blue Water. She has received the Pushcart Prize, two Great Lakes Book Awards, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of Miami.
Hometown:
Port Washington, Wisconsin; now lives in New York CityDate of Birth:
1964Place of Birth:
Lapeer, MichiganEducation:
MFA, Cornell University, 1991Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The boy, Gabriel, and his father stopped for the night somewhere north of Canton, Ohio. Around them, the land lay in one vast slab, the snow crust bright as water beneath the waxing moon. The nearest town was ten miles away, unincorporated, and there was nothing in between except a handful of farmhouses, Christmas lights burning in each front window; a few roads; fewer stop signs; a small white crossroads church. High above and out of harm's way were the cold, gleaming eyes of stars, and each one was so strangely iridescent that if a man in one of the farmhouses had risen for an aspirin or a glass of warm milk -- he could have been forgiven for waking his wife to tell her he'd seen-well, something. A glowing disk that swelled and shrank. A pattern of flashing lights. And she could have been forgiven, later, for telling people she'd seen something too as she'd stood by the bedroom window, sock-footed and shivering, her husband still pointing to that place in the sky.But a wind came up in the early morning hours, scattering the stars and moon like winter seeds, so that by dawn the sky was empty, the color of a tin cup. It was the day before Christmas. The air had turned cold enough to make Gabriel's nostrils pinch together as he stood in the motel parking lot, listening to his father quote figures about the length of time human skin could be exposed to various temperatures.
"It's not like this is Alaska, kiddo," Shawn Carpenter said, clattering bright-yellow plastic plates and cups from the motel's kitchenette onto the floor of the station wagon. The old dog, Grumble, who was investigating the crushed snow around the dumpster, shuddered as if thesound had been gunshot. The previous day, she'd ridden on the floor between Gabriel's legs, her face at eye level with Gabriel's face, panting with motion sickness. There'd been nowhere else to put her. Behind the front seats, the space was packed with all the things that hadn't been sold or lost or left behind: clothing, cookbooks, a color TV, a neon-orange beanbag chair, snowshoes, a half-built dulcimer, two miniature lemon trees in large lemon-shaped pots, and Shawn's extensive butterfly collection, which was mounted on pieces of wood and enclosed behind glass plates. whenever she'd started barking crazily, they'd been forced to stop and let her outside. The last time, it had taken over an hour of whistling to coax her back.
Shawn peeled off one of his gloves and held his bare hand out toward Gabriel. "One one thousand," he said, counting out the seconds. "Two one thousand. Three one thousand."
They were on their way to Ambient, Wisconsin. An oily light spread toward them from the edge of the horizon, and now Gabriel could see I-77 in the distance, a thin gray line slicing through the snowy fields, unremarkable as a healed-over scar. A single car crept along it, and he imagined it lifting into the air as lightly as a cotton ball. He imagined it again. If you believed in something hard enough, if your faith was pure, you could make anything happen -- his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Welch, had told him that. Miss Welch was born again. Still the car kept moving at its careful speed, and Gabriel knew he must have doubted, and that was the only reason why the car kept dwindling down the highway to a point no brighter than a star.
"You see?" Shawn said, and he wriggled his fingers. "If this was Alaska, my hand would be frozen. If this was Alaska, we'd probably be dead."
Grumble had found a grease-stained paper bag. Her tail moved rapidly to and fro as if she believed something good was inside it. Yet Grumble wagged her tail just as energetically at snowplows and mailboxes, at the sound of canned laughter on TV, at absolutely nothing at all.
"A dog, on the other hand, is a survivor. Warm fur, sharp teeth. A survivor!" Shawn said, and he must have enjoyed the sound of that word because he said it again as they pulled out of the parking lot. Gabriel stared back at Grumble, hoping she would look up, hoping she would not. Then he faced front and kicked the plates and cups aside, making room for his feet against the vent. He pulled off one of his mittens and picked up a cup, which he held in front of his glasses. Peering through the oval handle, he watched the land compress to fit into that tiny space. "She'll find a nice family," Shawn assured him. "She'll forget all about us"
Noreen had been much harder to leave behind. Shawn still owed her money from the camper, which they'd bought with money she'd saved from years of work at a small insurance company. That was when they still had plans to travel cross-country-Noreen and Shawn, Noreen's son, Jeffy, and Gabriel -- to Arizona, where the weather stayed warm and dry. Noreen had a soft Southern accent that made the things she said seem original and true, and she knew how to do things like make biscuits from scratch. It had been five months since Shawn and Gabriel moved into her one-bedroom apartment in Fairmont, West Virginia, and sometimes, during that first charmed month, when it was too muggy to sleep, they'd taken their blankets onto the tiny balcony and lain there beneath the stars, talking about the future -- even Jeffy, who was only four and didn't understand what anyone was saying. But the camper had brought one thousand dollars, money that would get them to Wisconsin and feed them until Shawn found work. He handed Gabriel the thick wad of fifties and hundreds, letting him feel its weight. "You'll have to help out with expenses for a while," he said. "A paper route, kiddo, how do you feel about that?"
Gabriel imagined slogging through the snowdrifts, dragging a wet bag of newspapers behind him. "Maybe I could work in a restaurant," he said, although he wasn't sure a ten-year-old could do that kind of thing, even if he was big-boned, the way people said.
"A paper route would be better for you -- exercise, fresh air, all that."
"OK," Gabriel said warily-was his father going to start in on his weight? -- but Shawn stuffed the money back into the deep pocket of his coat and turned on the radio. More soldiers were arriving in Saudi Arabia; aircraft carriers had moved into striking range of the Gulf. "Listen up, son," Shawn said. "There's going to be a war." The sun was gaining strength, bloodying the hoar-frost that clung to the shrubs and the tall wild grasses that poked up through the snow crust at the edges of the highway. They passed an intersection boasting the world's largest collection of rocks, a car dealership with its necklace of bright flags, a nursery selling Christmas trees beneath a yellow-and-white-striped tent. The land was flatter than any place Gabriel could imagine except, perhaps, heaven, with its shining streets of gold. Miss Welch had told the class all about heaven and Jesus Christ, and how, if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they would be filled with the power of God and could perform any miracle they wished. River Angel. Copyright © by A. Ansay. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
What People are Saying About This
Let me say what has already been very clear: Manette Ansay can write like an angel. River Angel is the best novel I've read this year, and I would say for several years. The prose is beautiful, among the best being written, and the stories compelling and funny and sad and every other word you can think of to describe the work of a majory literary talent. There are no missteps, no matter whose point of view she is writing from. And she passes the real test for me: These characters haunts my imagination; they stay with me day after day, I speak of them when I least expect to, and I remember them as real people in whose lives I have participated.
A. Manette Ansay writes with exacting, winning precision.
River Angel walks the line between what we know is actually possible and what we desperately want to believe is true. This is Manette Ansay's richest, most complex, most beautiful book yet.
Reading Group Guide
About this Guide:
The questions that follow are intended to enhance your group's discussion of A. Manette Ansay's RIVER ANGEL. We hope they provide you with fresh ways of looking at this startling novel of secrets and faith in a small town.
About this Book:
Many citizens of Ambient, Wisconsin, believe the old tales of an angel living in the Onion River that runs through the heart of their town. Some claim to have seen it, "small and white as a seagull, hovering just above the water." It is this belief that leads a misfit ten-year-old boy to the river's edge one cold winter's night, where he encounters a band of troubled teenagers from the local high school, out drinking and driving around. Gabriel Carpenter vanishes that night, presumed drowned, though the teenagers tell different--and conflicting--stories. And when dawn comes, his lifeless body is found by Ruthie Mader in a barn a mile away. "His body was warm when I touched it," she says. "There was a small like flowers. And when I saw him there, I thought he was just sleeping."
No one in this quiet Midwestern community can agree whether a miracle or a hoax has occurred. But as the story spreads, and curious tourists overrun the town--some skeptical, others reverent, still others angling for financial gain--one fact becomes certain beyond any doubt: life here will never be the same.
Praise for this Book:"A writer with a gift for persuasive and shapely narrative. . .With River Angel, A. Manette Ansay has moved beyond her prior mastery of the family scene to a lucid, eloquent representation of the commingled and conflicting lives of atown." --The New York Times Book Review
"Wonderful. . .I feel an overwhelming compulsion to thrust River Angel into people's hands and insist ÔRead this! Now!'. . .Not many writers can top Ansay's insight into character." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Ansay rivals Jane Smiley in her ability to bring the small-town Midwest to life. . .a wonderful novel." --Library Journal (Starred Review)
"Absorbing. . .stirring and provocative. . .a complex story intelligently told." --Newark Star-Ledger
Questions for Discussion:A. MANETTE ANSAY was born in Wisconsin and now lives in New York. She is the author of the novel Sister, winner of the 1996 Banta prize and a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a collection of stories, Read This and Tell Me What It Says, which won the AWP Short Fiction Prize, the 1995 Peterson Prize, and the 1996 Great Lakes Book Award for fiction. Vinegar Hill, the first of her novels, won a Friends of American Writers Prize and was named a Best Book of 1994 by The Chicago Tribune. Ansay's most recent novel, Midnight Champagne, was published in summer 1999.
For your continued reading pleasure, may we suggest the following Avon books, for which reader's group guides are available:
SISTER By Manette Ansay
THE MERMAIDS SINGING By Lisa Carey
ZABELLE By Nancy Kricorian
THE NIGHT BIRD CANTATA By Donald Rawley
LAST DAYS OF SUMMER By Steve Kluger