The Hereafter Gang

Doug Hoover wakes up at 10:35 AM on what he remembers is going to be the best day of his life. He has only two things on his agenda. He will quit his well-paying but thankless advertising job and leave his wife, Erlene. But we wouldn't have a novel if things didn't go wrong.

Before he can sit down with his soon to be ex-boss, Doug goes out for drinks with a friend from the office. She slips him some bad drugs, and Doug becomes confused. Still determined to finish his agenda and get out of Dodge - or rather Houston - Doug goes home to pack his essentials and his cat. He finds a note from Erlene and learns that she has jumped the gun on the leaving bit and run off with a televangelist. And getting back to the office to quit his job, well things keep coming up. Like drinking and dope and eating barbeque. Doug finds himself in the finest dive bar he's ever been in in his life, talking to a cool kid who has this whole "skipping out" thing down to a science. When he leaves, still focused on quitting that job, Doug finds himself on the floor. Doc Holiday and Cole Younger help him up and get him on his way. At worst, he's had a minor heart event. Perhaps not surprising since Doug is a couple of decades older than he looks. He periodically rejuvenates himself by burrowing into the rich black earth of Waxahatchie, Texas. It literally works wonders.

Since Doug doesn't have the advantage of having read the title of the novel he stars in, it takes him a good two thirds of the book to catch onto what's really going on. By that point, my patience with Doug and his creator (Neal Barrett, Jr, not God) was wearing thin. As much fun as the book may be page by page, it is fatally overwritten. Doug's drug-addled mind tends to wander, and there are enough digressions and so steady a flow of new characters that readers might long for the clean, straightforward narrative of Tristram Shandy. I confess to skimming some towards the end. But even now, writing this months after I read the novel, I find myself wanting to read parts of it again. But please God not the whole thing.