A surprising and delightful read. It goes down like an old fashioned, satirical adventure novel such as “Don Quixote” crossed with an absurd cross-country road trip as in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World” or a comedy starring Peter Sellars.The set-up is nicely done in the preface and first chapter:There lived in the piedmont of North Carolina a decent citizen and responsible family man named Raleigh Whittier Hayes, who obeyed the law and tried to do the right thing. He had a wife and two daughters… Everyone who knew him called him reliable Raleigh, hardworking Raleigh, fair-and-square Raleigh, and, in general, respectable, smart, steady, honest, punctual, decent Raleigh Hayes.He has become used to being a pretty average guy, a come-down from ambitions that started at an early age:As a baby, like all his peers—for there are no agnostics in the cradle—Raleigh Whittier Hayes had been a believer, the world contagious with magic, he the center and circumference, his the mana to summon Titans to his bedside, set birds flying, move clouds with a stare, scare waves away. Maturation immunized him by slow infection. His powers weakened. By five he could no longer change a traffic light from red to green, had no idea what dogs and cats were talking about, and was considering the possibility he might be mortal. At a meeting of civic leaders of the town Thermoplylae (nice mythic Greek touch, eh?), Raleigh’s after dinner fortune cookie foretells: “You will go completely to pieces by the end of the month.” What Fortune soon challenges him with is that his gravely ill father, Earley, runs off from the hospital with a black teenage girl with a brand new Cadillac. The cryptic message he gets from him is that to receive his inheritance before Earley spends it all is to “get your ass screwed on backwards” by mounting a quest (a “holy adventure”) that includes the bringing certain people and things to New Orleans in two week’s time. The people and things end up taking him a lot of work to track down through family members he has been successfully forgetting, such as his Aunt Victoria and his ex-con half-brother Gates. Just as he begins to formulate a plan, he gets another fortune: “This is your lucky day.”I loved his trepidation at the beginning:He could leap from the car and hide out for the rest of his life in the abandoned movie theater, peacefully staring at the blank screen. He could puncture his eardrums and never have to listen to another word anybody said. He could forfeit his inheritance, let Mingo and Victoria jabber their way to New Orleans by themselves, while he sold his house and beach property, and, investing his profits in canned goods, move to the Knoll Pond cabin to await the approaching nuclear holocaust with Aura and the twins; he’d fish and Aura would teach the girls to belly dance.Along the way, a motley crew is slowly accumulated as participants in his madcap adventures. The first to join in is Mingo, his fat, buffoonish friend from grade school who effectively becomes his Sancho Panza. He garners his loyalty by saving him from suicide or homicide (and/or by going along with his plan to evade false murder charges by escaping to South America). Mingo is so insecure he thinks Raleigh is having an affair with his wife (Mingo: “I ought to know God wouldn’t let something like that happen.” “Right”, growled Hayes, “He’s too busy starting earthquakes and famines.”) When he finally tracks down his brother Gates, he agrees to go along if Raleigh will help him with a task, which turns out to be a drug deal in a small boat at sea. Other adventures in short order include run-ins with Mafia figures ripped off by Gates (Cupid Parisis Calhoun and Big Nose Solinsky), a kidnapping by “a van of ‘devil worshiping thugs’, getting saved by radical nuns, and a battle with the Ku Klux Klan.In the process, Raleigh and his companions begin to fulfill aspects missing in their lives, somewhat like the characters in “The Wizard of Oz”. In helping people and going with the flow, Raleigh begins to feel like a hero. His surprising affinity for an elderly Jewish convict, “Weeper” Berg (whose speech is peppered with words he has learned from reading the dictionary through the letter “C” in prison—e.g. “benison”, “censorious”), leads him to some special insights:Here he was, despite his fastidious moral balance, protecting an adultress, drinking to excess, abandoning his work, throwing away money, getting in fights, lying, stealing, not to mention aiding and abetting the duping of innocent people while sheltering (indeed worrying about) an escaped convict (and not even a falsely convicted one, but a confessed burgler of sheikhs and Newport magnates). And yet on the other hand Berg was trying to help Gates, and yet Gates was a crook himself, and yet Gates was his blood relation, and yet ..and so the circus rings flew spinning by.Just when I thought I couldn’t laugh anymore, the adventures keep taking one more step over the top. After seemingly endless excess (540 pages!), it was great when Raleigh lightens up a bit over his outlook on what the dubious Creator might owe him:It created for creation’s sake alone—for no cause except but infinitely that one, striping the zebra, spotting the leopard, making the eel glow and the deer leap—and it was not obliged to nourish or even preserve at all any of its creatures, species, planets, or galaxies. Given that this was so, thought Hayes, the truth was, it’s possible, one might say, assuming creation owed him no more debt than it owed the dinosaur, than an artist owed a doodle, then, all things considered, he, Raleigh Hayes, with his wife and children and health and house, had been an extremely lucky man.All in all, this book fired on all cylinders for me except its excess in length.
Because this book is so determined to be sweet, how could I not love it? But I didn't. It has a lot going for it: the dialogue is catchy, much of the humorous dialogue was actually funny (though note that I didn't laugh out loud once)* the settings are well rendered, and its regular forays into reflection were wistful and honest, though straying into heavy handed commentary from time to time.Yet my overall experience of the book felt like a chore: the premise was over-determined, the plot overwritten, and the characters were so over the top in whichever attitude they represented that they felt like characters in a morality play that could have been called "UPTIGHT DUDE LEARNS TO LIGHTEN UP". This book was written before the onslaught of Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies but in this book the whole grotesque cast serves as a MPDG for the protagonist to live a little. IN particular the brother's con man brother Gates, who provides the bulk of the humor, could be said to fulfill this foil function. Malone seems like a really good guy, but the author's omniscient and judgmental commentary on Raleigh (the main character) made the result predetermined; unlike Ray from Dog of the South, we know exactly what's going to happen to Raleigh: he's going to learn to live a little. We know this because the author keeps elbowing us incessantly in the ribs using every plot event of the structure to point+ this out. Which gets to my main problem with the book: it goes on forever. Even though I thought some of the family-based flashbacks were good, and in one case (when the author points out that Raleigh doesn't really know his family, and do we every really know anyone (paging Heinrich Boll)) it's very good, it felt like a grind to follow this zany treasure hunt filled with completely unnecessary tangents. Despite the books light tone, the weight of events dragged it down... this was particularly annoying because it's so obvious how the book will end. *I compare this to Portis only because I was told this was one of the funniest american novels. I would say that beyond style and chops, there's a big good reason why Charles Portis's books were so short: to keep something zany up for so long, especially when the end is so predictable, is really exhausting for the reader.
Do You like book Handling Sin (2001)?
I have never lived further south than Kalamazoo, MI, and this is one of the best books I've read this year. It might be funni*er* to you, but even folks who've never experienced Southern culture can (and do!) love it.
—Whitney
I started this book nearly thirty years ago and never finished. I am so glad that I returned to it now. If I was ever going to return to writing, this is the sort of book I would like to write. It's got a bit of everything except graphic sex or violence, not to say sex and violence are not there, they just aren't the raw version we see in other novels these days. In bygone years, the book would be described as picaresque, nowadays I think they call it a "road trip" novel. Throughout the tone changes from saccharine sentimentality, ala Nicholas Sparks, to comic, even to the point of being like the Keystone Cops, plus there are moments of beautifully wrought contemplative description. Some might think this uneven tone is a flaw; I believe it was intentional, even to the point of experimental, but not in shocking way. Anyway, if you're interested in a good story and a rollicking good time, this is one helluva good read.
—William
I loved this book when it first came out and love it still. The wonderfully Quixotic quest which Raleigh Hayes' father sets for him is as fresh and funny as it was 25 plus years ago. Earley, the father, a defrocked priest, has run away from the hospital and, having emptied his bank account and purchased a yellow Cadillac convertible, is last seen in the company of a young African American woman, heading for New Orleans. He leaves a recorded message for Raleigh giving him a series of baffling assignments and promising to meet him in New Orleans in two weeks. Raleigh and his irrepressibly optimistic, loyal neighbor Mingo, his charming ne'er-do-well brother Gates, and the elderly escaped convict Weeper Berg have a series of adventures that includes: kidnapping by Hell's Angels, rescuing an interpretive dance troupe from the Klan, crashing a debutante ball, delivering a baby in the back of a semi-tractor, a duel, a battle with armed gangsters at Stone Mountain and a jam session in a New Orleans bar.It is a hilarious and at the same time touching portrait of the extended Hayes family, a multi-generational tribe of lovable eccentrics. In the course of attempting to follow his father‘s wishes, Raleigh’s fairly rigidly defined version of himself is blown to bits as he discovers things about himself and his family that he had never suspected, and that make him happier than he ever envisioned.
—Monica
