t’s not the usual mid-life temptations, a young chick or a new Harley, that have Eliot Smith casting about restlessly as he enters his fiftieth year on the planet. Rather it’s the “things done and left undone” in his life that send him off on a meandering road trip in Eliot’s Tale, the engaging new novel by Gary Carter.

What Eliot finds troubling as he looks back over his life is the nagging admonition in the Book of Common Prayer that he perhaps has been remiss “by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” So, rather than sweating the mysteries of tomorrow, this basically nice guy decides to hit the road to answer the questions of yesterday. Taped to the dash, drawn from his favorite work of the poet after whom he’s named, is a single quote: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning./The end is where we start from.”

Eliot leaves behind a testy wife already bothered by his current state of existence, and with a secret of her own. Roaming from Virginia to Mississippi to Arizona and points in between, from family to long-lost friends to strangers with an intersecting tale, the solo traveler finds that others will tell him things he wanted or needed to know, letting him deal with things done or left undone. What he hears ranges from the outrageously funny to the deadly serious, while his own observations on his small-town upbringing and coming of age in the 1960s can be insightful, troubled, lewd or just plain hilarious.

According to the author, virtually everyone has unresolved “things” in their past that can be nagging and troubling, whether minor or monumental. “Sometimes it’s just something we wish we had handled differently or resolved at the time,” Carter explained. “But these also can be questions or perspectives that haunt us and affect us, even as we look to the future. For Eliot Smith, he decides the best way to move forward with his life, which has its issues, is to revisit people and situations from his past in order to try and understand them, for better or worse. He finds it’s not an easy process and certainly not painless.”

Carter is an experienced writer and consultant who provides communications and marketing services to a variety of organizations, working both inside corporations and as owner of his own firm. He is a former award-winning journalist who continues to write on a range of subjects for magazines and on the web, and also has published short fiction and poetry. He is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A copy of Eliot’s Tale can be ordered directly from Back Nine Books at http://www.booklocker.com/books/4250.html, or it can be downloaded as an Ebook. The book also is available online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other outlets, and can be ordered though local independent booksellers.

The book’s first chapter can be read at http://www.booklocker.com/books/4250.html. An excerpt from Eliot’s Tale, “The Ghost of Dale,” was published in June by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and can be read at http://www.deadmule.com/fiction/2009/06/gary-carter-the-ghost-of-dale/.

The author welcomes comments and questions, and can be contacted through Back Nine Books at backninebooks@gmail.com.