Handling Sin
Michael Malone, 1983
Sourcebooks
622 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781402239335
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)