I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.Īn amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Most readers will find Pat just about irresistible.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Still, its judicious blending of pop-culture experience with richly persuasive characterizations (including a beautiful indirect one of Pat’s overburdened mom) make the book a winner.Ī first novel that doggedly does its own thing (we’re reminded of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes). But Quick allows it to bulk up needlessly, concocting too many scenes (e.g., at Eagles games) that are too similar to one another. If the novel were 50 or so pages shorter, it might have been terrific. Deftly timed surprises stimulate crucial revelations, and the full truth of both Pat’s sufferings and his own egregious contributions to them expand the novel’s basically simple comic-domestic texture into something far more disturbing, complex and, eventually, quite moving. Determined to end his painful “apart time” from Nikki and win her back, Pat-a former history teacher who now struggles to regain mental acuity-works out like a demon in his basement gym and runs many miles daily, while assiduously “practicing being kind rather than right.” This isn’t easy, given the cold shoulder offered Pat by his sullen father (who lives and dies by his beloved Philadelphia Eagles) the clumsy attempts of brother Jake and best friend Ronnie to revive the old convivial Pat and the WASPish presence of Ronnie’s wife’s sister Tiffany, recently widowed and obsessed with newly buff Pat to a very scary degree. Pat has returned home to live with his parents in a New Jersey suburb following a stay in a Baltimore mental institution, whence he was committed after reacting irrationally to a breakup with his beloved wife Nikki. In Quick’s immensely likable debut novel, an emotionally damaged loser runs a complex pattern that transforms him into a hero we can all root for.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |