Book Reviews
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
Publishers Weekly
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
Library Journal
Michael Malone’s Handling Sin is a comic novel whose depths are almost deceptively hidden by a happy-go-lucky exterior. Beneath the improbable story — which concerns a respectable man who must pursue his elderly father on a humiliating wild-goose chase across the American South — is a tale that encompasses complex issues such as racism, the claims of family, and the extent to which "respectability" is a virtue. Readers will laugh at the goings-on in Malone’s whimsical universe, but they may also see in them a reflection of the world they experience every day. The theme of family in Handling Sin is sure to start many conversations. On the one hand, Malone is a master at portraying the uncomfortable comedy that results when a family contains more than a few eccentrics, and his hero, North Carolina insurance salesman Raleigh Hayes, must put up with an almost endless assortment of relatives who are decidedly not, by his middle-of-the-road standards, normal. But as Hayes digs deeper into his family's history, he finds that what he’s been quick to judge is far from simple, and his attitudes about family raise issues of real significance, such as identity and race in the modern South, and the conflicts between compassion for others and the need to care for oneself. Raleigh's journey into his family history becomes multilayered and in turn will provoke many to think about the funny and serious sides of every family. Book clubs may particularly enjoy sharing their ideas about the literary influences behind this almost epic-sized tall tale. The strange quest on which Raleigh finds himself borrows liberally from such masterpieces as Don Quixote and Tom Jones. Readers of John Kennedy Toole’s modern classic, A Confederacy of Dunces, will also spot many of the citizens of that nation among Malone’s southern eccentrics and hopeless cases. It’s almost impossible to exhaust the hunt for these literary connections in Malone's highly sophisticated novel; and while Handling Sin is too much fun to feel like work, reading group members will discover just how "heavy" the themes in this lighthearted book can become. —Bill Tipper
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