Idgie Says:Joseph is an accomplish poet and even though this is a fictional novel, you can tell. The flow and structure of the sentences are beautifully created. You immediately become absorbed in the words..........even before the story itself.
This is a novel about a man with a plan who loses himself along the way and must find his place in life once more, while dealing with the end result of his previous actions.
He's not a bad man, he's a man whose made mistakes with, unfortunately, deep consequences. He wanders down South to escape those consequences .... and perhaps find himself again.
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The Life of the World to Come
A Novel
An intrepid road novel stretching from the steel mills and gambling dens of Pittsburgh to the rough-hewn small-town South.
George aspires to leave his blue-collar, Catholic neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. He is on the cusp of graduation from college and headed for law school when he becomes entangled in a local gambling ring. After his father gets laid off at the steel mill, George dramatically increases his wagering to help his parents with finances. What's more, he allows his boss at his real job and love interest's father, a pharmacist named Phil Rosechild, to place bets through him with the gambling ring's volatile kingpin.
As his parents' financial situation deteriorates, George delves deeper into gambling, and he even goes so far as to set up Phil by using the pharmacist's unschooled and ever-growing betting practices to his own end—cheating the father of the woman he loves. When Phil welches on a large bet that George has placed for him, George finds himself in life-threatening trouble and must abandon his law school dreams. He robs the pharmacy, steals the delivery car, and flees south.
After his stolen car breaks down in Queen, North Carolina, he meets a young, mysterious woman known as Crow. The two form a bond and eventually take to the road in an attempt to reconcile their harrowing, often surreal destiny and to escape George's inevitable punishment.
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, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University, as well as the poet laureate of North Carolina. He is the author of eight books of poetry and two novels, among other works. His most recent novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award, and his 2014 collection of personal essays, Half of What I Say Is Meaningless, earned the 2012 Will D. Campbell Award for Creative Nonfiction.