It's not unusual for me to wish that an author had ended a book another way. But I believe that only in Angel's Flight did I want the author to just stop writing at a certain point. If you had just quit here (p. 251) or perhaps even here (p. 237), I want to tell Don Ryan, you would have produced a major piece of American fiction. What was the problem? Didn't you understand what this book is about? Did you think you were being paid by the word? Oh well, I suppose getting angry won't help.
Angel's Flight by Don Ryan. Boni and Liveright (1927), 296 pp.
An unemployed reporter is down and nearly out in mid-1920s Los Angeles. He meets a fellow at a mission, who introduces him to another man at a speakeasy. who offers him work at "the beach." Badly in need of cash, he accepts the offer to take part in what turns out to be an unusually violent bootlegging operation. Then, much to his surprise, he lands a job on a local paper. There he writes stories of ordinary people trying to cope with life in the city, including the mother of a convicted murderer, a sixtyish insurance salesman, a blonde bank robber, and many others. And he joins Angelinos in their favorite spots: boosters at a Kiwanis Club meeting, wannabe go-getters at a religious lecture, showy revelers at the Cocoanut Grove, the leisurely jobless in Pershing Square. Sometimes he tries to make sense of what's happening, but mostly he just reports on it.
Angel's Flight is one of the seminal works of Los Angeles fiction. It is perhaps the first book to contrast the city's romantic image -- palm trees, endless sunshine, movie stars -- with its everyday realities. Ryan wants to show that L. A. has the same problems of other big cities, but with more variation and more weirdness. It is, as his protagonist's editor says, "the greatest sideshow on earth." There's nothing everyday about Ryan's writing style. He joins together staccato outbursts of sentence fragments, highfalutin references to classical mythology, and a persistent use of the present tense. He moves easily between first- and third-person narrators. This is a fascinating book, and it would have been a great one if it had only ended earlier. Ryan gets diverted when his main character enters the movies and goes off the track completely he takes up residence in New York. Even so, this is a fun read and a must for anyone interested in the literary history of Los Angeles.