Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Historical, Lang:en
Summary
Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of
Hank Williams—not just in the figurative sense, not just
because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not
just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final
morphine dose that killed him. In 1963, ten years after Hank's
death, Doc himself is wracked by addiction. Having lost his
license to practice medicine, his morphine habit isn't as easy
to support as it used to be. So he lives in a rented room in
the red-light district on the south side of San Antonio,
performing abortions and patching up the odd knife or gunshot
wound. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in
the neighborhood in search of Doc's services, miraculous things
begin to happen. Graciela sustains a wound on her wrist that
never heals, yet she heals others with the touch of her hand.
Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except,
maybe, for Hank's angry ghost—who isn't at all pleased to
see Doc doing well. A brilliant excavation of an obscure
piece of music history, Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of
This World Alive is also a marvelous novel in its own right, a
ballad of regret and redemption, and of the ways in which we
remake ourselves and our world through the smallest of
miracles.