Wendy Brandmark writes with unexpected lyricism of the longings of two women who feel the world quite does not understand them. Neither do those Angry Gods of the title:

She doesn’t believe but she’s always talking about’ the angry gods’, appeasing them like ravenous dogs with pieces of our life, my life. But they are never satisfied.

When I tell her she’s superstitious she says, ‘Don’t give me that.’

But I see her looking up whenever I come home with a good report card. She can hear them already, striking their shields, howling and stamping their feet as they descend on us.

Out of those two lives the more complex and, understandably, the one that catches the reader’s attention for longer is that of the older woman, Sonia, a lonely Jewish schoolteacher who, at thirty-one, still lives with her parents, unable to find herself a good husband. Her two elder brothers call her ‘fussy’ and busy themselves trying to find a good Jewish man for her. Sonia’s family life becomes increasingly alienating and suffocating and her way out of it is to accept the offer to share a tiny apartment in another part of the city with a work colleague, Irene, an acid ex-Communist who is, too, desperately trying to evade a bleak future as a spinster by marrying a man with means.

In the tiny apartment, Sonia lies awaken most nights, listening to the sexual activities of Irene in the other bedroom and to the marital woes of her next door neighbours. She is restless, hot, thirsty, so she begins to wander the streets around the apartment at night, -‘I feel safe in the darkness’, she says, at some point - in her pyjamas and her coat, as a sleepwalker in search of something to awaken her from her thirty-one year old dream.

One night she meets a librarian who accepts to walk her to the underground station. The man is a black poet called Caleb Pink, a tall and impressive-looking man, it transpires from the book. There begins the love story, only that blue-eyed and blond prince charming is in fact a black man old enough to be Sonia’s father… in fifties America.

He tells me he has no time for romance, why his wife walked out on him. In the evenings after he comes home from the library, he sits at his desk writing poetry.

When Sonia’s brothers discover the affair they do everything possible to tell her off it, threatening her with telling the parents, ‘you will kill Papa’ they say. I would challenge any single person who, once in a while, has not fallen in love with someone ‘wrong’, meaning someone inadequate, with someone one feels wary to introduce to the parents, to show off to the family, someone they cannot claim as a prize but as a sort of handicap, however good and caring and articulate the loved one is.

‘You want to ruin your life?’

I feel nothing, am as pure and cold as the polar wastes behind the glass window of the museum. A Negro man stands beside me laughing at Julius’s small life in the small rooms where his wife fries latkes and wipes finger marks from the furniture.

This is, I think, key to the novel: Caleb is Sonia’s symbol of a different life, a better life, the life she has been longing for in her night walks across the city, because this is where she feels safe, ‘in the darkness’.

And so Sonia’s story sees her lying to herself, forcing herself to reconcile two different worlds, her Jewish family, who wants her married to a nice white Jewish man and her lover, the poet, an articulate Negro man who defies Sonia’s prejudices:

‘Not that he [Caleb’s father] had much time for us. He was a big man in Harlem. A lawyer. Everyone came running to him when something went wrong. Big daddy make it all right again. And he did.’

‘Really.’

‘Yes really. I lived in his shadow for thirty years. But that’s another story.’ He turns to me. ‘What did you think I’d say? He was a porter? Maybe a sharecropper?’

‘No. I’m just impressed’.

Fourteen years and another America later, the other quiet voice of the novel begins to speak to the reader from the oppressiveness of her own youth and of her own family: Dad is fine but Mum is always picking on her, finding little faults in Helen. Until Helen discovers a notebook full of poems and several photos of her mother embraced to another man and so the reader finds out what sort of relationship binds together the two main characters of the novel. With the poems and the photos, Helen is slowly discovering the woman behind her mother; she is getting to know her in an almost biblical sense:

I blush as I read[…] I turn the pages fast because each one is an embarrassment; my mother throwing off her clothes, dancing before me naked, laughing in my face for I have never seen her with nothing on.

Helen blushes as she reads, for the lady that wrote those notebook poems has grown fat and bitter and has let go of dreams, hope and passion.

Helen’s sexuality is awakening, rubbed by her opinionated friend Sheila, who has a black boyfriend called Eddie and who replicates her mother’s youth friend, Irene, in her cockiness and sarcasm. And for Helen, too, love brings unhappiness: the nice boy who gets to kiss her for the first time at a holiday resort happens to prefer the company of another boy; the impossible wall to climb in Helen’s story is homosexuality and not race, as her story unfolds in another New York, where race relations and interracial marriages are not a forbidden apple any more or are they? Towards the end of the novel, her old friend, Irene, asks Helen’s mother:

‘Don’t you ever think what if? I’m always thinking what if. My shrink says I torment myself.’

‘So don’t torment me.’

‘But everything’s changed now. Now if you met him, well it could work out.’

‘Do you really think everything’s changed? Because if you do you’re more naďve than I thought,’ my mother says, her voice so full of scorn that I stop myself from putting my hands over her eyes.

Brandmark’s prose is quietly beautiful and there are many pages filled with a sort of masterful lyricism – the sort of unassuming lyricism we so desperately need in the literary world of any language, really. It is that masterful lyricism which, most of the times, makes up for the shortcomings in the narrative, for one feels that this 160-page novel has been unsatisfactorily cut short. Certainly Helen’s chapters should have been longer and the black poet, Caleb Pink, undoubtedly the most complex character of the book, turns out to be surprisingly shallow for all his importance and weight in the novel. Perhaps, aspiring to be a Goya portrait, he has to be contented to pass as a Daumier caricature.

On a more positive note, it is quite brave of the author to decide to carry on telling Sonia’s story after she marries someone else, when most novels would end in that loveless marriage and would have had the reader guessing what has become of the passionate Sonia who had such an inappropriate lover and so, some fourteen years later, Brandmark introduces another character, the daughter, to explain what has happened to Sonia over the years. Yes, I think bravery is the word to Brandmark’s narrative structure. But now let’s leave the two women in the novel to rest so as not to awake the Greek arbitrary gods of Homer or the awesome Jewish patriarch who poisoned Cain with envy, those Angry Gods that hover above a more than satisfactory debut novel from an American writer who, tastefully indeed, has decided to make of London her home.