Book Review: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive

by Robert Burke Warren, June 28, 2011

I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive
Steve Earle
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, $26

In the last decade or so, celebrated singer-songwriter-activist-author Steve Earle has applied his storytelling chops to playwriting (“Karla”), political discourse (his satellite radio show “Hardcore Troubadour”), and short fiction (the 2001 collection Doghouse Roses ). And as a seven-times-married recovering addict, former jailbird, Fox News irritant, and ardent opponent of the death penalty, Earle has packed a lot of living into his 56 years. So the fact that his luminous, eight-years-in-the-writing debut novel I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive is a fascinating read should come as no surprise. What’s remarkable is that it rivals his best work as a multi-Grammy-winning songwriter. No one will be saying, “Don’t quit your day job, Steve.”

For I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Earle breathes life into an obscure character of music history apocrypha: the mysterious doctor who shot morphine into alcoholic Hank Williams Sr. on New Year’s Eve 1953, hastening the untimely death of the 29-year-old icon. Earle fleshes out this mystery man and christens him Joseph A. Ebersole III, MD, aka Doc, a defrocked, heroin-addicted physician. Ten years after Hank’s demise, Doc is marking time on seedy South Presa Street in San Antonio, Texas, living on the fringes, financing his habit by performing abortions and emergency medical care on prostitutes and criminals in his room at the Yellow Rose Guest Home. When Doc shoots up, the wily ghost of Hank annoys and taunts him, sometimes as the personification of shame and guilt, sometimes for reasons revealed as the story spools out.

Earle inhabits the voices of several deftly defined characters (mostly Doc) to create a world of refuse and squalor, leavening it with shimmery magical realism: the specter of Williams, the occasional tantalizing evocation of pre-Columbian Indian spirits, the power of healing touch. These elements combine with in-the-pocket dialog rhythms and Cinemascope-worthy scene settings to create a palpable world in which action unfolds at a brisk bluegrass tempo.

When young Mexican Graciela’s boyfriend abandons her after a life-threatening abortion, the spirited senorita becomes Doc’s assistant, touching and changing the lives of all, especially Doc, to a soul-deep degree. The story percolates hot (and funny) when Doc, Graciela, and a ragtag bunch from South Presa stand cheek-by-jowl with an ecstatic, diverse crowd to catch a glimpse of JFK and Jackie at San Antonio International Airport, only to share collective horror when the Catholic presidente is assassinated days later. As Graciela emerges from the shadows of loss with changes to body and spirit, strange happenings—whispers of miracle—arouse the attention of a local priest with serious anger management issues.

In the corporeal landscape of I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, abortions are illegal, segregation is the law, the institutional authority of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church is formidable, and the only folks looking out for the losers are, at face value, fellow losers. These deeply flawed, complicated holy fools, both ghostly and real, have populated Earle’s songs for decades, restricted to verses, choruses, and melodies. In I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Earle gives their hard lives more facets, resulting in passages of breathtaking detail, sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing, yet always glowing under Earle’s loving touch, wry humor, and lyrical brevity; the pace is so expeditious that the gruesome and the glorious go down with equal ease. One hopes Earle’s fiction jones haunts him like Hank haunts Doc: relentless and never satisfied.