Like Love and Happiness, Angel Down is a novel told in one long gallumphing run-on of a narrative. Love and Happiness is a single paragraph, and Angel Down is a single breathless sentence, chopped up into paragraphs.
I’d already read Daniel Kraus’s thriller Whalefall, about a man who is swallowed by a whale, so I’m familiar with his particular style of Biblical obsessions. But Angel Down is even more baroque than Whalefall, as you might expect from a World War I novel about some troops finding an angel in no man’s land.
Unfortunately, the premise of the book interested me more than the execution. Between the over-the-top constraints and Kraus’s seeming intent to really Hammer Home the Point, the novel felt more like an essay about a great book than a great book itself.
The whole time I read Angel Down, I couldn’t stop thinking about another overambitious, under-satisfying war novel with a fantasy twist—Chris Adrian’s debut novel, Gob’s Grief, which was about a main character who wanted to build a device to bring all those killed in the Civil War back to life. Ultimately I wonder if it’s possible to satisfactorily blend the unrelenting reality of war with the suspension of disbelief required from big genre ideas.