Beach Music
By Pat Conroy
Doubleday, 628 pages, $27.50
Pat Conroy has taken entirely to heart Tolstoy’s “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” “In its own way” is Conroy’s great subject. His two acclaimed novels, “The Great Santini” and “The Prince of Tides,” showed his readers exactly what it feels, smells, tastes and, above all, smarts like. Now in “Beach Music” he returns to the ties that bind–half lifeline and half noose.
“Beach Music” is one of those delicious novels that has everything to make your weekend-with-a-book great: characters that stick to the ribs, dialogue that can crackle as sharply as twigs in a campfire. It has intelligence, it has heart. It is suffused with Conroy’s regional sense, with the tragedy and loss that hang over the post-Civil War South like a miasma, causing it to spend too much of its substance on an impersonation of itself. Best, it has Conroy the storyteller at full throttle, as if he were pounding it out on two or three typewriters at the same time.
Jack McCall, the hero of “Beach Music,” is a familiar Conroy Southerner who, like this highly autobiographical writer, comes from a town in coastal South Carolina near Charleston. His father, once the respected town judge, has become the town drunk, an embarrassment and anguish to his five sons. His mother, tormented by her own sordid childhood, has retreated into a history made up of bits and pieces of “Gone With the Wind”-ish cliches.
The novel begins with the suicide of Jack’s Jewish wife, Shyla, the child of Holocaust survivors whose horrors she has made her own. With her father’s camp number tattooed onto her forearm, she jumps off a bridge. In their grief, her parents sue Jack for custody of their granddaughter Leah. Although he wins the case, the experience crystallizes in Jack a long-standing resentment against everything and everyone around him. With his daughter in tow he decamps for Rome, where he becomes a successful food and travel writer. He tries to live as though, like Botticelli’s Venus, he arose out of a sea shell, no burden of family, friends, even history.
Then one day Jack is called back home because his mother is dying, and he is immediately swept into the old emotional underbrush. Like a procession of phantoms, his life reappears around his mother’s deathbed.
There are his boyhood pals–Mike Hess, now a big-shot Hollywood producer; Capers Middleton, son of the town’s “best” family, now a right-wing politician with an eye on the governor’s chair; Jordan Elliott, the natural leader, now a Trappist monk hiding from his past and a ’60s-era tragedy that tore the group apart.
There are Shyla’s parents, the Holocaust survivors, who want to reconcile with their Catholic son-in-law by telling him for the first time, horror by horror, what they suffered at the hands of the Nazis. There is Jack’s old girlfriend, Ledare Ansley, who has finally shucked off her homecoming-queen image to reveal the serious woman inside. Most of all, there are Jack’s four brothers–one a schizophrenic–who rally around their mother during the long death watch and proceed to rattle skeletons in all the various closets.
No one is Conroy’s superior in flaying off the layers of politesse in family (or in an extended family of close friends; for him it amounts to nearly the same thing). And he is unsurpassed in the old-fashioned, rock bottom writer’s art of storytelling, one of the great traditional Southern crafts, after all. But “Beach Music” has other rewards, little extras that take you by surprise.
I was moved, as one always is, especially when the subject is taken up by a gentile, by Conroy’s deeply felt Holocaust accounts. He manages to tell the untellable without calling undue attention to himself or skidding too far into showy sentimentality. He still has something disturbing to say about the ’60s, the Vietnam misery, that other Civil War that shredded our country, sundered friend from friend.
Conroy is justly famous as a word painter, principally of the swamps and mists of coastal Carolina. He also is very witty; not since the Smothers Brothers has there been such fraternal badinage as in “Beach Music.” And not since Mark Twain have such rural pleasures as boys gone fishin’ seemed more tangible. Conroy, to his credit, is not afraid of traditional macho nostalgia.
It’s so easy to like “Beach Music” that it comes as a shock to discover that you don’t altogether respect it. Conroy, who must be among the most disarming of successful writers, chastises himself in interview after interview for tics from which his books suffer. (This one has a few of its own.) It’s as though he writes so propulsively that he hurtles past that stern schoolmarm of the mind whose job it is to remind you that the orotund phrase you love tonight will look like a painted tart in the morning.
There is a good deal of hyperventilating prose here that, like Conroy’s subject, will remind readers of his literary forebear, Thomas Wolfe–for example, “It was here we gathered to say farewell to the sunburned, dark-complexioned days which fingerpainted the river in the tenderness of its insomniac retreat.” He is fatally drawn to reconciliations, likes to kiss and make up, and although these codas are satisfying in a music-up, credits-roll sort of way, not a single one in “Beach Music” rings true.
At the head of the story Conroy insists that the McCall mother was an iceberg when her sons were small, too slippery with the truth and too preoccupied with herself to be of much use to them–so much so that Jack is prepared never to see her again, so much so that her sons don’t believe her at first when she gets leukemia, a ploy they have heard once too often. Yet the character we actually get is a great tragic old gal, brave, resourceful and true, still beautiful, a tender and assiduous mother and grandmother whose first and second husbands and all five sons are torn apart with love and sorrow at her illness.
I know nothing of the situation of Jews in small Southern towns of the ’50s and ’60s, but in “Beach Music” there seems to be an eerie absence of any remnant of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. The two young Jews are included wholeheartedly, unself-consciously in the group–never a hint of anti-Semitism. Were there no Jew-hating White Citizens’ Councils thereabouts? No parents muttering “be careful how you choose your friends?”
The entire last section of “Beach Music” finds all the principals brought together by Hollywood Mike to be filmed in a retelling of their history, a segment so stagy and melodramatic that even Mike would have been ashamed. Then there is the Leah problem. Conroy plainly wants to contrast his bleeding, battered families with Jack’s determination to raise his daughter in one small corner of perfect love and trust. Unfortunately, this turns Leah, a heavy-duty symbol in these pages, into the treacliest child since Pollyanna. Though deprived of her mother–by suicide!–at an early age, though whisked off to a foreign country where she speaks not one word of the language, though often left with a hired hand (a baby sitter, that is)–situations in which real children sulk, throw fits or heavier objects–Leah always remains pert, cute, sweet and understanding of her Daddy. Only once in the book does she sound like a real kid, when she threatens to barf at the idea of surviving, if she had to, on a diet of grubs.
It was once said of imperial Germany that its situation was “serious but not hopeless;” of imperial Austria’s that it was “hopeless but not serious.” Many novels are excellent without being irresistible; “Beach Music” is irresistible without being excellent. Pat Conroy shows every sign of having it in him to manage both. Maybe next time he will.
