Demonstrating a spirited grasp of the genre, Malone (Dingley Falls) has written a "romance novel'' in the original sense: a long tale of chivalrous heroes and extraordinary events. This madcap book bubbles with a frenzy from the first pages, an initially disconcerting pace that rarely allows the reader to catch a breath. With a wink to Cervantes and Dickensas well as the Marx Brothersthe narrative recounts the two-week odyssey of Raleigh Whittier Hayes, an upstanding citizen of Thermopylae, N.C., and Mingo Sheffield, his Sancho Panza. They encounter a bizarre cast of characters during their adventures, including Raleigh's criminal half-brother Gates, his prison buddy Weeper Berg, and aging jazzman Toutant Kingstree. Their quest, to unfairly simplify it, is to recapture Hayes's ailing father, who has escaped from the hospital with a young black woman, and who has left Raleigh a strange set of tasks to fulfill before a planned rendezvous in New Orleans. While tantalized by the promise of a secret treasure at the end of the journey, Hayes uncovers family secrets and Raleigh is granted a large measure of self-enlightenment. This is a highly refreshing tale in which Malone has managed to make the bizarre hilariously credible.
Handling Sin
Narrated by Nick Sullivan
Michael MaloneUnabridged — 24 hours, 59 minutes
Handling Sin
Narrated by Nick Sullivan
Michael MaloneUnabridged — 24 hours, 59 minutes
Overview
On the Ides of March, our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes (forgetful husband, baffled father, prosperous insurance agent, and leading citizen of Thermopylae, North Carolina), learns that his father has discharged himself from the hospital, taken all his money out of the bank and, with a young Black female mental patient, vanished in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Left behind is a mysterious list of seven outrageous tasks that Raleigh must perform in order to rescue his father and his inheritance.
And so Raleigh and fat Mingo Sheffield (his irrepressibly loyal friend) set off on an uproarious contemporary treasure hunt through a landscape of unforgettable characters, falling into adventures worthy of Tom Jones and Huck Finn. A moving parable of human love and redemption, Handling Sin is Michael Malone's comic masterpiece.
Editorial Reviews
With braggadocio, Malone says in his acknowledgments that he expects a major movie company to buy Handling Sin. And his novel's scenario does seem designed to outdo Cannonball Run, Peyton Place and, at times, Porky's. It stars Raleigh W. Hayes, Baptist Church stalwart, Civitan regular, staid insurance agent, who miraculously metamorphoses overnight into Bruce Lee/Rocky/Rambo as he totes a pistol, battles the KKK and the other gangsters, poses as an FBI agent, and shades of Mickey Spillaine, has sensuous women swooning as he travels from Thermopylae, N.C. to New Orleans with excessively contrived adventures. This episodic novel panders with explicit sexual encounters, manipulated incidents/coincidences, and flagrant reliance on deus ex machina. But, alas, there is little reading pleasure in it. Glenn O. Carey, English Dept., Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond
Handling Sin is a comic odyssey…Constantly sharp and funny…A knick-knack gem-crack high-time circus, with intriguing sideshows, and an abiding spirit of fun…This novel is some show.”
Terribly funny, emotionally engaging, and almost impossible to set aside.”
Handling Sin is terrific…Large spirited, beautifully crafted, and extremely funny…Dozens of vivid, eccentric creatures…A dazzling display of caricature and high energy farce…Grand and lovely.”
Phenomenal…A hilarious success.”
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176679229 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2023 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Like everyone else, Raleigh Hayes saw the world, and the people with whom he was obliged to share it, through the kaleidoscope of his own colored designs. As the years turned the viewer round and round, the bits of glass fell into new patterns, but the perspective remained limited to Raleigh's eye.
That there was a world that was not merely an elongation of his own limbs, that there were people in it who were not merely extensions of his own will, he had accepted, in frustration, before the age of two. He had learned by then that he did not make himself bounce merrily in air, nor was the woman's voice saying, "This is the way the ladies ride. Trot trot trot," his own. The fingers that made the church and steeple, made the white bear jump out of no place into view, tucked the shiny blanket around his shoulders, were not his own fingers, nor was the man's voice his that said, "Goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite, Little Fellow."
But if this knowledge gradually shrank him, so that he no longer painted pictures in which he towered not only over his stick-legged parents, but over the square house and the round spoked yellow sun; still, to the boy, the world beyond his ken stayed shadowy, and he as indifferent to it as it was to him. Outside Thermopylae there was nothing mapped on the globe but Cowstream to the east, the state capital to the west, the beach, beyond the beach a vague ocean, and, indistinctly, a shape called North Carolina surrounded by an incalculable shape called America, surrounded by, in the first years of his life, that "Overseas" where "We" were trying to win against "Them" before they took over the world and killed everyone in it.
As with everyone else, age did not entirely enlarge the young Raleigh's point of view. He realized there were a great many other people, up to their vague other business, but he assumed that the world around him was, simultaneously, unremittingly engrossed in Raleigh Hayes, while remaining utterly incapable of penetrating his secrets or understanding his unique personality. He believed both that his teachers noticed no other pupils but him, and that they never saw him down the row of yellow desks, reading "Joe Palooka" comics behind his math book, or nodding off to sleep in warm study periods, or staring heartsick at one of those girls whose rope-jumping usurpation of the sidewalk had once so annoyed him. Believed both that the whole fourth grade stared at him in the halls, and that none of them knew that his parents had divorced. Believed both that his mother had no life distinct from his, and that she had no inkling that he ever hid the evidence of his wet dreams at the bottom of the laundry hamper. Believed both that the entire town of Thermopylae was talking about the fact that he had bought a package of Trojan condoms at the drugstore, and that not a single person suspected what he might want to do with them. Like everyone else, Raleigh Hayes did not realize that most other people heard more and cared less than he imagined, just as he cared less about their secrets than they believed.
In his preoccupation with himself, Raleigh was certainly not unusual. Our hero was, however (particularly for a citizen of a small southern Piedmont town, out of which, or into which-as his aunt Victoria said-almost nobody had budged for two hundred years), rarer in the thoroughness of his indifference to what did not concern him, and even to what did. As the edges of his world moved back and the shadowy figures in it took on color and form, it was his habit to map and neatly label the typography, then explore no further. This disinterest he came to perceive as a virtue: he never gossiped, and would not willingly listen to the gossip of others.
All his life, Raleigh congratulated himself that it was not in his character to open mail not addressed to him, to open doors without knocking, to pry when it was none of his business. When his Hayes relatives began chortling together through long evenings of garbled gossip about each other or anecdotes about whatever they had managed to remember or make up about the Family Past ("Tell the one about when Papa went up with the barnstormer and the wing fell off. Tell the one about Aunt Mab and that jibber-jabber bigamist from Chicago"), Raleigh picked up an erector set or a stereo kit or a book. He, frankly, wasn't interested.
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