Handling Sin Book

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.