2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE WAGES OF SIN a review by Thomas Wolf Joseph Bathanti. The Life of the World to Come. Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 2015.
THOMAS WOLF has an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a twotime winner of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. His Betts Prize story “Boundaries” (published in NCLR 2012) was also awarded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. Wolf is the co-author, with his wife, Patricia L. Bryan, of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Algonquin, 2005), a nonfiction narrative about the century-old Iowa murder case that inspired Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles and short story “A Jury of Her Peers.” Although primarily known for his service as North Carolina’s poet laureate from 2012 to 2014, JOSEPH BATHANTI is an accomplished fiction writer, the author of the award-winning novels East Liberty (Banks Channel Books, 2001) and Coventry (Novello Festival Press, 2006; reviewed in NCLR 2008), as well as the short story collection The High Heart (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007), which won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction in 2006, and this new novel. He also writes nonfiction, and his essay collection Half of What I Say Is Meaningless (Mercer University Press, 2014) was reviewed in NCLR Online 2015.
In the opening pages of The Life of the World to Come, the reader meets George Dolce, a young man in deep trouble. It is New Year’s Day, 1975, and George, who finds himself in Queen, NC, has become, in his words, “a lammist, a fugitive” (2). George has arrived in a stolen car and soon meets a mysterious, and possibly dangerous, young woman named Crow, a waitress who keeps a red Bible and an unlicensed handgun in her bedside table. Crow’s father is a member of the local Ku Klux Klan, and her mother, a voluptuous mountain woman, kills poisonous snakes with her bare hands. But for George, Crow is a dark angel of mercy. Crow takes George in and gives him shelter. Over the course of the novel, in chapters that alternate between present time and George’s backstory about growing up in the rough and economically depressed area of Pittsburgh known as East Liberty, George reveals the circumstances that have forced him to flee his hometown. He has left behind his parents, a girlfriend, and a promising future. While most of George’s high school peers have drifted into lives of hard work and poverty or drug addiction, George is one of the few young men from East Liberty with an opportunity to achieve a better life. But in his senior year of college at Duquesne University, as he awaits acceptance into the Ivy League law schools to which he has applied, George’s dreams come crashing apart. The story of George’s fall from grace comprises much of the action in the narrative. Simply
PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDA FOX
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put, George gets involved in a gambling scheme that involves betting on professional football games, and he becomes a victim of bad luck and miscalculation. To avoid retribution, and possibly death, he leaves town. Throughout the novel, George encounters an assortment of characters who live on the ragged margins of society: bookies and junkies, ex-cons and future cons. His father is a recently unemployed factory worker. His mother is depressed and painfully crippled by arthritis. When Crow finds George a dishwashing job at the restaurant where she works, George meets the cook, a remorseless woman named Too Bad, who has served a ten-year prison sentence for killing her third husband and reminds people that “I’d do it all over again” (36). A few chapters later, George is introduced to Crow’s mother, Wanda. In a passage that might have been pulled from a short story by Flannery O’Connor or Ron
ABOVE Bathanti at the Greenville Museum of Art, 26 Mar. 2015, following a three-day poetry writing
workshop for veterans sponsored by ECU’s Contemporary Writers Series (The broadside he is holding, designed by Linda Fox, features his poem “Saint Francis’s Satyr Butterfly.”)