Beached Prose Pat Conroy’s Storytelling Gift Deserted Him In Overblown ‘Beach Music’
“Beach Music”
By Pat Conroy (Doubleday, 628 pages, $27)
After achieving a moderate amount of success by writing books that draw heavily on his Southern upbringing, novelist Pat Conroy hit the literary big time with his 1986 best-seller “The Prince of Tides.”
Blending themes that Conroy had touched on in previous books, including “The Great Santini” and “The Lords of Discipline,” “The Prince of Tides” was a remarkable accomplishment. Its lush prose recalls Thomas Wolfe, and its weighty subject matter - that of a man attempting to recover from harsh childhood wounds - is capably carried by the power of Conroy’s style.
Whatever else was wrong with the novel, and it does have its faults, “The Prince of Tides” established Conroy as a superb storyteller whose sensitivity to time (1950s-60s) and place (coastal South Carolina) was only enhanced by his feel for the poetry of language.
And so there was every reason to believe that, as the years passed, the 49-year-old writer would end up publishing a novel that was even more accomplished. Now, nine years later, we have that new novel.
Its title is “Beach Music,” and - there’s really no gentle way to put this - it is a crushing disappointment. In short, “Beach Music” is a mess of insipid characterizations, implausible plot points, witless dialogue and, hardest to take, sophomoric prose.
It is everything that “Prince of Tides” is not.
One way in which the two books are similar is in size. Both cover a wide range of years and experiences, making them weighty tomes that, in an emergency, would make decent doorstops. Yet even at 628 pages, “Beach Music” reads as if some sections are missing.
Which very well could be the case. A recent Vanity Fair article disclosed that Conroy’s editor, the esteemed Nan Talese, helped Conroy pare “Beach Music” down from his original 2,100-page manuscript.
We may never know what ended up on the office floor, except, Vanity Fair reports, for a suicide scene that was rewritten after the real-life suicide of Conroy’s youngest brother. But whatever else was cut, the operation didn’t help.
One of the main strengths of “Prince of Tides” is Conroy’s feel for place. From the first page, as he begins rhapsodizing about geography being his “wound,” Conroy convinces you that no one has ever written better about the Carolina marshlands.
It seems strange, then, that the first hundred pages of “Beach Music” are set in Rome. For as Conroy takes his protagonists, the American writer Jack MacCall and his young daughter Leah, through Rome’s crowded streets, he never connects with Italian geography the way he did with South Carolina in “Prince of Tides.”
Where there he was able to evoke the very scent of tidal flats and marsh grass, he now does little more than amass a guidebook listing (See: Tourist Spots, Rome). The result is just names, not meaning.
Jack and his daughter are in Rome because he is running away from his past. Seems his life-long love, Shyla, threw herself off a high bridge, and Jack is still mourning the loss of her. But, this being a Conroy novel, that is hardly all he is mourning.
We discover the rest of his painful past when, after a five-year absence from his hometown, Jack receives word that his mother, Lucy, is dying from leukemia. The oldest of five sons, his presence is needed. Indeed, it is demanded.
So Jack returns, and immediately he is propelled back into his turbulent past, which includes characters such as:
His violent, alcoholic, abusive and brilliant father, Judge Johnson Hagood McCall.
His ex-in-laws, George and Ruth Fox, Holocaust survivors who once blamed Jack for their daughter’s death and, subsequently, sued for custody of Leah.
His four brothers, but especially the youngest one, John Hardin McCall, a paranoid schizophrenic who lives in a tree and, even in his lucid moments, is most threatening to his own family.
His old high-school crowd, including the crass movie producer Mike, the hypocritical politician Capers, the priest Jordan, ex-cheerleader Ledare and the defining moment of ‘60s activism that broke their friendship forever.
The retelling of that incident, which involves protesting the Vietnam War, is the book’s climactic sequence. But it is only one of several subplots. Others include:
Lucy’s horrid childhood and the secret involving a priest that she ultimately reveals.
The survival story of Jack, Jordan, Mike and Capers, who face certain death in an open boat on the stormy Atlantic.
Lucy’s struggle to save the endangered loggerhead turtles that build their nests on the Carolina shore.
The predicament of Jordan, whose Marine Corps general father is the archetype of an abusive parent.
Jack’s near-tragic encounter with terrorists in the Rome airport.
John Hardin’s kidnapping of a sickly Lucy.
Ruth and George’s death-camp experiences.
Not to mention the mystery of Shyla’s death, a Moby Dick-like manta ray, the Catholic Church, gourmet cooking, Vietnam, etc.
Got the pattern? In his zeal to write “Beach Music,” Conroy includes so many sequences, subplots and minor characters that it’s hard to keep track of the action without a program.
But that wouldn’t be so bad if he had just displayed some discretion in his characterization and prose style.
In terms of characters, Conroy’s problem here is worse even than even the most ridiculous aspects of “Prince of Tides” (which are the exact aspects on which Barbra Streisand, in her estimable wisdom, chose to base her movie adaptation): One-dimensional portraits.
Women such as Shyla are the most beautiful imaginable. Leah is the smartest, most precious and beautiful child imaginable. Judge McCall is the best legal mind in all the south. No one can stand up to a bully the way Jordan does, nor to a wildlife regulation officer as does Lucy.
This is not characterization; this is hyperbole.
Then again, such exaggeration perfectly fits Conroy’s writing style, which here has turned from appealing to riotously purple. For example, take this lovemaking scene:
“I surrendered myself to the night, a night when sex bloomed like a wildflower in a secret alcove of the imagination, when lust roared and bawled and allowed itself to be primal, animal, unnameable as it was in the caves and forests and the light of fires when fire was not yet a word and the body still was a being without a name.”
And when the, uh, moment of truth comes, Jack says, “My scream met her scream and our tongues bruised against the sound.” You go, boy.
But even this is not the worst. Conroy saves that honor for his Big Picture, in which he has the gall to link both the specter of Vietnam and personal family dysfunction with the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II. Jack’s life was hard, he tells us, and harsh was the effect that Vietnam had on his generation. But things, Conroy lamely seems to say, could always be worse.
Oh, really?
The abuse that Jack and his siblings endured from a hard-drinking father, melded with the mixed blessing of being raised by a loving-if-neurotic mother, earns them justifiable sympathy. Just as author Conroy and his siblings deserve compassion for what they went through in real life.
But to imply that being raised by a martinet, even a “Great Santini,” is in any way comparable to the attempted genocide of a whole culture is ludicrously self-indulgent.
Writing, for Conroy, clearly is a form of self-therapy. And if geography is the man’s “wound,” then confession is his cure.
But only occasionally does therapy end up being art. And while it happened with “Prince of Tides,” “Beach Music” misses the boat.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ‘BEACH MUSIC’ FLYING OFF SHELVES Being stylishly late may work for partygoers and rock stars. But in publishing, where marketing campaigns and print runs are carefully scheduled to match selling seasons, the more punctual a book is in reaching bookstores, the better. So last year, when Pat Conroy’s newest book, “Beach Music,” failed to show up in time for Christmas, booksellers rolled their eyes and some even lowered their sales estimates. But Conroy’s popularity, forged first with “The Great Santini” and cemented with “The Prince of Tides” (both published by Houghton Mifflin), does not appear to have suffered. His new 628-page saga made its debut at the No. 1 spot on The New York Times Best Seller. The book is now in its third printing, at 855,000 copies. Booksellers say that it is selling two or three times as fast as their other hot titles, and that he is only partway through his 34-city author tour. New York Times