Midnight and Sometimes Later

A railroad novel, "Midnight and Sometimes Later" tells the story of three men who work on freight trains, in Minnesota, in the 1970s--and various women with whom they are involved. The protagonist, Lou Maki, describes his role in two romantic triangles as they form and disintegrate. The railroad bureaucracy demands its workers to lie, repeatedly and ever more ingeniously, in order to get any time free from work. This background of lie-telling sits in the middle ground of the tale, while, in the political background, Richard Nixon and his band of crooks find their construction of crimes and lies falling apart around them.
"Midnight and Sometimes Later" is a story of friendship and betrayal, of danger, strength and blood, in mid-America as it enters the waning decades of the twentieth century. Also, it is a story of Minneapolis in those mid-1970s, with its West Bank culture of bars, coop cafes and hardware stores, outlandish clothing, soul music, and a general reliance on alcoholic and chemical stimulants: a tale about the prevalence of lies, and the repercussions of those same lies, in a loose and slapdash world.