THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507130591
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE McAVOY
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
IN AUGUST 1994, Pat Conroy's younger brother Tom killed himself by leaping from a building in Columbia, S.C. Like Shyla Fox McCall, who kills herself at the opening of Conroy's new novel, Beach Music, Tom represents the devastation that results from family dysfunction, a topic with which Conroy is all too familiar.
Conroy has built his reputation on surviving and examining this subject. In Beach Music, however, he expands his exploration into global and cultural dysfunction, and attempts to link two great horrors of the 20th century - the Holocaust and the Vietnam conflict - in a cycle of violence as natural and predictable as the tides. The result is an interesting, though often disappointing, mixture of the best and worst of Conroy's writing.
At its simplest, Beach Music is the story of Jack McCall's emergence from a horrific past. After the emotional cacophony of his wife Shyla's suicidal plunge from a bridge in Charleston, S.C., and a bitter custody battle with his wife's parents, Jack flees with his daughter Leah to the ``leaf-brown silences'' of Rome. There, he loses himself in the winding streets and grand cathedrals of the ancient world. Thriving as a food and travel writer, Jack specializes, he says, ``in the artistry of my own escape from what was most intimately mine.''
A late-night telegram, however, informs him of his mother's diagnosis with leukemia. Sure that he can neither ignore nor escape her death, he returns to South Carolina to confront the remnants of all that is his: the reality of his mother's impending death, the unresolved grief of his wife's suicide and the shattered friendships that have shaped his life.
His confrontation is a painful but healing reconciliation with the people and events of his past. The primary focus of his efforts is his mother Lucy, a cold and manipulative former stripper from the North Carolina mountains. For 40 years, she has masqueraded as a pillar of the Waterford community and perpetrated the crimes her five sons cannot forgive, raising them with emotional sterility and providing them with nothing more than food, shelter and protection.
Their father, Johnson Ilagood McCall, once a respected judge, has become a gutter-drunk and the laughingstock of his hometown. He is able to fill the vacuum of his sons' lives with nothing but criticism and loathing. Wounded by their parents' inability to convey love, Jack and his four brothers battle their demons with sardonic humor and cling to the scars of their pasts.
While his family struggles through the imminent loss of its matriarch, Jack begins to salvage his relationships with Shyla's parents, both victims of the Nazi reign of terror, and four childhood friends whose lives are so entangled that clarity and closure seem impossible. Complicating his efforts, Mike Hess, a hotshot Hollywood producer, asks Jack to collaborate on a miniseries chronicling their mutual experience of growing up in Waterford during the war-torn '60s, an experience Jack would rather forget.
Though his high school girlfriend Ledare Ansley agrees to co-write the script, Jack refuses to commit to the project. Capers Middleton, former leader of the old gang and Ledare's ex-husband, sees in the miniseries a chance to advance his gubernatorial campaign by reviving the friendships he betrayed 25 years before. And Jordan Elliot, who fled South Carolina and became a Trappist monk, returns to face his punishment for an accidental homicide he committed during a protest against the Vietnam War.
Though never fully realized, Beach Music is Conroy's most ambitious and promising work to date. His familiar gifts of honesty and compassion, of lyrical use of the language and of fascinating, well-developed characters are evident. So, too, are the use of simplistic devices to resolve his plot and the familiar excesses of sentimentality and prose that even Conroy admits are sometimes a ``little much.''
Despite its flaws, Beach Music flows with a mastery of storytelling that grows with each of Conroy's works. It reminds us that each predator, including man, is another's prey, and offers the hope that, through acceptance and forgiveness, the cycles of an indifferent Nature may be broken. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by Joyce Ravid
Pat Conroy...
Photo of book cover
by CNB