The Mighty Angel

Book excerpt: "How can the loftiest flights of the soul ever be equated with a fearful barfing?" Good question, one of many posed by our narrator in this novel of a writer coming out of his 18th stint in rehab. He begins unabashedly"Yes indeed, I had been drinking peach vodka, brutishly longing for one last love before death, and immersed up to my ears in a life of dissolution." Polish novelist Pilch (His Current Woman) slyly weaves together a large-cast story of the wages of intoxication. Like many verbose drunks, the narrator is not without wry insights and mocking self-awareness; he likens the rehab center to a creative writing program. The analogy is apt since the novel's language mixes a bemusing sort of grandstanding amid formidable words like farinaceous, divigations, forfend, and horripilates. The center may remind one of Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, while the character names (Moses Alias I Alcohol, Don Juan the Rib, and the Hero of Socialist Labor) recall Thomas Pynchon. A quick read, spellbinding as a raised glass.Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.