Last night I finished reading Handling Sin, by Michael Malone. This was another choice I made without knowing anything of the author or the book; an interesting cover caused me to pick it up and intriguing comments/reviews compelled me to buy it. Don't be misled by the cover (closeup of a clerical collar) and/or title: it isn't about sin, or Christianity really - although some characters are churchgoers and one a defrocked Episcopal bishop. Those are merely facets of the complex personalities of many colorful characters who people the novel, not a pervasive theme. It's really about family: the love, the insanity, the comingled desire to hug and kill our relatives and one man's discoveries (internal and literal) about himself and his loved ones. What a wonderful story! It's a long book, over 600 pages, but I never felt like, "Oh, get to the point already!" or "Won't this ever end?", rather, I was entertained the entire time.

I think it would be amusing to anyone, but it struck a particular chord with me as a Southerner with an extended family not too dissimilar from the protagonist's. I loved watching our hero, pragmatic Raleigh Hayes, as he tried to cope with the sometimes stubborn, always vibrant, eclectic and eccentric assortment of relatives and neighbors surrounding him in Thermopylae, North Carolina. Situational humour abounded, such as Raleigh's attempt to inject order and reason into the raucous family sing-along celebrating his Aunt Lovie's sixtieth birthday, while Uncle Bascomb, stricken with a stroke, is propped in one corner of the couch and spoon-fed daquiris.

Another passage I read (and re-read, it was that funny) involved Raleigh trying to mend a long-standing family feud by offering to buy a disputed property from his contemporary in the opposing family. The other fellow, under the impression that Raleigh knows his deepest, darkest secret, believes he is being blackmailed into surrendering the property. His ascerbic remarks, threats to involve the police if it doesn't end with the deed transaction, subsequent nasty letters and messages thoroughly confuse Raleigh, who eventually concludes that a rumoured strain of insanity in that family has finally surfaced. Similar hilarious situations abound and indeed make up the narrative of the book.

Malone has a great turn of phrase, as well. For example, in explaining one family dynamic he writes, "Their son, Boone, had proved too much for the public schools to handle and was locked up in the Citadel."

On the negative side, some of the events seemed both extraneous and far too contrived, even for a novel as rollickingly quixotic as this one - for example, the childbirth, the run-in with the Appalachian School for the Performing Arts and their persecutors, the political battle waged by Raleigh's wife during his absence. It is also hard to imagine certain characters as they are sketched behaving in a few of the ways Malone depicts them - that one's hard to explain without giving away too much of the narrative, but to put it another way, there are a few key things that people are supposed to do or have done which just don't ring true for those characters, even given the passage of time and extraneous concerns. And some of the events are just a little too contrived and coincidental, even accounting for the willing suspension of disbelief required of the reader.

All of that having been said...er, written, it was one hell of a great read. Anyone with a family, a sense of humour, a love of a good story and a fondness for the absurdities of everyday life should definitely pick up a copy. You won't be sorry.