As much as I loved my summer of Robin Jones Gunn, I'll admit that I'm pleased it's over. She's a terrific storyteller, but after a while her stories start to sound the same. And you can't read about middle-class white people taking vacations forever. So it felt good to finish all the books I own by her and move on to something new.
Something new turned out to be something brand new. Rarely do I read just-released books, for a couple of reasons. First, I have enough books on my shelves that I haven't read to last me a few years. So I don't see the point in buying a book that has just come out when I won't even get to it till most people have forgotten it. Second, I generally don't believe in hardcovers. I realize that some people find a lot of aesthetic value in them, but for me they are too expensive, and when they fall apart (which they will, if you read them enough times) it's much more of a bummer than when a paperback does. I don't own very many hardcovers, and I think the last one I bought was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The reason I bought that was because I had been waiting for it for so long, and I needed to read it right away.
That more or less explains why I bought Pat Conroy's South of Broad in hardcover. One of my top-ten all time favorite's is Beach Music, which he published in 1995 and I read in 2001. It's also the last novel he published, so when I found out he was finally writing another one, I knew I didn't want to put it at the bottom of the list. I bought it and read it right away. My assessment in one sentence: It was no Beach Music.
Conroy's milieu is the coastal South, and every one of his books takes place there (though he also takes his characters on location to places like Rome, New York, and San Francisco). He is obsessed with conflicts of race and class, with the culture of the deep South and how it plays out in the lives of families and neighborhoods, and with the way the sins of the fathers visit the sons. He always has a suicidal major character (sometimes that character succeeds, sometimes not), and his main character is always a man who is disturbingly codependent with and yet mercilessly judged by his mother. It's not hard to tell where Conroy is coming from. He's no stranger to the school of "write what you know." And there's nothing wrong with that, although I for one would appreciate a story with no suicide for once.
Despite the familiarity of his setting and story structure, Conroy's books tend to stay afloat on the strength of his lush descriptions and the epic scope he lends to the narrative. By the end, it always feels as though great battles have been won and lost, and whole family lines rescued from destruction. It's tough to do this without turning it into a soap opera, so this is no small feat. Unfortunately, these two things are what South of Broad happens to lack. I was stoked to see what new ways Conroy had devised to describe the marsh grass, the tide coming in, and the the sun rising over the sea, sure that in fourteen years he must have collected a thousand new ones. Alas, most of his setting descriptions read like tired remakes of ones from The Prince of Tides (which I also loved) and Beach Music. It's almost as if he's come up with a Mad-Lib-like system for metaphors: "The (adjective) sun rose (adverb) over the (adjective) river, which was a (something the river reminds me of) in the morning light." For any other writer, this might be forgivable, because not all of us are geniuses. But Pat Conroy is, so this sort of laziness is depressing.
The narrative was also disappointing. It had its moments, and I appreciated the way he depicted the bonds of friendship among the main characters. It felt like something was at stake, as is usually the case in his books. But instead of creating that feeling out the ordinary conflicts and struggles families and friends have, Conroy felt the need to weave together two things I don't believe he's tried before: a mystery and a thriller. The mystery is slightly more successful. The group spends the middle part of the book searching for one of their friends, Trevor, who is living in California and is likely dying of AIDS. They find him and rescue him from a boarding house in a mildly exciting scene. But I wasn't nearly as interested as I was in the plotline from Beach Music in which an army deserter spends much of the book hiding from his father. That carried a great deal more suspense for me, and the payoff was better because of the family conflict. The thriller in South of Broad falls even flatter than the mystery, and was ill-advised in my opinion. Somewhere in Conroy's past must be an episode of great violence, perhaps of a sexual nature, because each of his books includes something of this nature. In this one, the father of two of the friends spends the entire book hunting for them, trying to kill them. Various members of the group encounter him in various situations throughout, but these random events don't hang together in any cohesive way. It's never clear exactly why this man is so damaged, and Conroy ordinarily does a pretty decent job of humanizing his villains. There's also no clear build-up of suspense, a requirement for a storyline like this. The man appears, then disappears, then reappears, and the connections between these episodes are thin. His demise is so anticlimactic it almost ruined the book for me. All good thriller writers know that if they want their readers to buy into the suspense they are trying to create, the payoff better be good. This one was such a letdown I hardly noticed it had happened till afterwards.
The book is not without its merits. I liked that Conroy took on the AIDS crisis and made one of his characters homosexual. He likes to ground his stories in specific time periods, sometimes spanning many years, and he is careful to create a cultural climate. It was important that he deal with this particular issue if his characters were going to have any part in the late 80's. And the relationships among the members of the group seemed authentic - some were very good, others were not, all had good and bad sides. The sexual politics were a bit self-indulgent, but I expected nothing less. One relationship in particular that I thought was extremely well-done was the one between the main character, Leo, and his father. For the first time Conroy managed to create a father that did a halfway decent job of raising his son, and there were no ulterior motives. Of course, the father dies just as Leo finishes high school, so I guess all good things must come to an end. The setting descriptions were adequate, even though they fell short of what he has done before. All in all, I'm glad I went ahead and bought this and read it, because Conroy will always be a favorite of mine. But I think that if you are going to take a 14-year break from writing, you should have more to show for it.
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