I’LL NEVER GET OUT OF THIS WORLD ALIVE by Steve Earle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 243 pages, $32 cloth. Rating: NNN
American troubadour Steve Earle revisits the territory of his short stories – drug addiction and despondency – in his debut novel, I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive. (Earle’s put out a companion CD by the same name.)
One-time practising MD and now middle-aged morphine addict Doc supports his habit by treating gunshot wounds and STDs and performing illegal abortions in San Antonio’s underbelly. It’s 1963, and Doc’s world consists of a few short blocks of the ghostly South Presa Strip. That is, until 18-year-old Mexican healer Graciela comes along.
This is a story of redemption with an unlikely cast of characters that includes the ghost of Hank Williams, who appears in italics when the doctor is asleep or about to get high. Everyone in the community – drug pusher Manny, lesbian guest house matrons Marge and Dallas, corrupt plainclothes officer Hugo, ominously named priest Father Killen – is touched by Graciela’s miracle work and the stigmata-like wound on her arm.
Though Earle poetically describes the mindset of an addict, and his ruminations on the difference between fleeting loneliness and lingering lonesomeness are poignant, the dialogue is clunky at times. And his two-dimensional depiction of Graciela is disappointing.
Earle the novelist has yet to master pacing, but his prose is wryly clever, and the supporting characters, though shallow, are empathetically drawn. Peppered with Mexican slang, the novel weaves in an appearance by JFK and Jackie the day before the assassination, speculation on Williams’s death and conflicting ideas about religion, spirituality and abortion.
An engaging read despite its flaws.
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