Angels Go Naked a Novel

By Cornelia Nixon

Book Overview

Angels Go Naked is the vexed love story of Webster, a microbiologist at Berkeley, Margy, a violinist for the Chicago Symphony, and the collision course they call their life together. Against all probability, they meet, fall in love, and marry. Margy begins to think about having a child, and it is here that Cornelia Nixon most brilliantly captures the troubled but deeply symbiotic union of a wife who says she desperately wants children and a husband who refuses to become a father. The arc of this couple's unhappiness is traced in a funny, sad, and compassionate series of beautifully imagined scenes. As in her celebrated novel Now You See It, Nixon's gifts are apparent on every page.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582430624
• ISBN13: 9781582430621
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Eros and angst

This elegant collection of prize-winning short stories makes a nearly seamless novel. The extraordinary main characters are Margy, a violinist with the CSO, and Webster, adult child of psychiatrists who wants to return to his nebulous Native American roots. Nixon is an exquisite writer who writes what she knows and seems to know a lot of things especially music and science. She is equally adept at portraying the sights, smells and sounds of love but always with a delicate touch. This sensuous reading experience should also appeal to those who are not particularly interested in reading relationship type novels because of the fine descriptive, researched and just plain gifted writing.

Smart and glamorous

Angels Go Naked does everything right in showing us how things can go wrong. The price of being human is knowing not only that we will die but that we will visit disaster on ourselves and those we love. The consolation for being human is we apprehend the beauty and glamor of the world, the exquisite little wrinkles of shocking intelligence. Both that price and those consolations are evident in the pages of this wonderful novel.

moving and beautiful

Like much of life itself the power I felt in this reading was in what was not said, in the spaces in between. Melodic and poetic view of humans as complex beings in relationships. It's crept back into my consciousness often after I finished it a couple of months ago.

A funny, beautiful, moving book

From the first page of Angels Go Naked, I was engrossed. The format of the novel -- a series of connected stories -- is beautifully effective. By exploring a series of moments, Nixon allows to know her characters in an internal and compelling way. They are passionate, funny, and very real people. Nixon truly understands the complexity of love.Nixon's use of language is spare but illuminating. This is one of the best books I've read this year.

Brilliant Fiction about the Inner Life

Cornelia Nixon's fine second novel, ANGELS GO NAKED, is largely about the turbulent inner world of the psyche. Not that we don't have a fine and very tangible idea of a host of characters--well beyond the principals, Cathy the violinist in the Chicago Symphony and Webster the marine biologist working on two doctorates--and of some marvellously described places such as Bolinas, California, Chicago, New York and, briefly, Venice, Italy, but this rousing work keys on the internal life of people and the conflicts it creates with their actual existence in the world of space and time. Thus ANGELS GO NAKED is the finest--and most ancient--kind of drama, written with heart-breaking clarity and wit. Bravo! Bravissima!