Lila Wingo - the beautiful, proud matriarch. Abused by her husband, she is the sweet and steely woman with social aspirations so great she is willing to sell her kids down the river to achieve them.
Henry Wingo - the cruel partriarch. Shrimper, schemer and loser, he is a man who will beat his sons to teach them not to cry. Now, perhaps too late, he strives to make peace with his own family.
Luke - the older son, a Vietnam veteran, a strong man of burning convictions who races towards a shocking fate while trying to save an entire town.
Savannah - the famous, gifted, and troubled poet. The cadenced beauty of her art and the cries of her illness are clues to the secret she holds in her heart. She has locked away the too-long hidden story of her wounded family. Now, to avoid destruction, it must be fully revealed.
Tom - Savannah's twin brother, the narrator. He is an unemployed football coach and English teacher with a loving wife who loves someone else. With his troubled sister and a perceptive psychiatrist, he is forced to look backward to unravel a history of violence, abandonment, commitment and love - and to find an answer for them all....
Woooo, doggy. This one was a doozy. I hope y'all like your Southern Gothic with a whole lotta shrimp, melodrama, and TIGERS, because that's what's on the menu tonight, folks. Now, strictly speaking, I'm not sure TPOT is Southern Gothic, since I get all my information from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia doesn't list TPOT on their Southern Gothic list. However, Wikipedia does describe Southern Gothic as:
[A] subgenre of gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. . . One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is "the grotesque" - this includes situations, places, or stock characters that often possess some cringe-inducing qualities, typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness - but enough good traits that readers find themselves interested nevertheless.
So let's see: set in the South? Check. Ironic or unusual events? Check check. The grotesque? Uh, yeah, check. The novel begins with events already piling up in quick succession: Tom, our narrator, learns in short order that his sister has been hospitalized for trying to commit suicide (again) and his wife is cheating on him, in part because of the emotional distance between them after his brother Luke's death and Tom's resultant nervous breakdown. Phew. Have you got all that? Good, because it doesn't slow down. The story is set up as Tom is relating his family history through flashbacks to his sister's psychiatrist, who is attempting to discover why Savannah is trying to die. The basic format is Tom, present day, telling the shrink of childhood events, which are related to us in episodic flashbacks. A great SECRET lies at the heart of the novel, but the flashbacks continue after that, up to the day of his brother Luke's death, which sets up the present day retelling.
TPOT is a rollicking good read. It's chock-a-block full of fine melodrama, aching sadness and depression, and long-buried secrets of the type you drive you insane. The pace doesn't let up - the foreshadowing in the first half of the book is enough to drive you to get to the big reveal, after which it's all downhill. And I mean that. The giant SECRET which is the apex of the novel is also oddly glossed over. If you read the flashbacks both before and after that, you would be hard pressed to say that anything had happened in between. The fallout, emotionally, is not discussed, in contrast to the fallout from Luke's death, which is what drives the New York scenes.
Conroy seems to think that the ending, with the final revelation of Luke's death, will be sufficient to explain the events of the present day (i.e., Savannah's wrist-cutting, Tom's breakdown, and the confession of all to Savannah's psychiatrist). Unfortunately, I didn't find that to be the case at all. If anything, I was left cold by Luke's demise, which is a feat, since I had been so fond of him in the flashbacks. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel's back, but the close unbreakable bond between siblings in the flashbacks seemed to have cooled by the time Luke's one-man stand rolled around, leaving me to question just why Tom and Savannah both went so kablooey over it. That's maybe the biggest weakness of the book. The SECRET in the middle is completely unforgettable, and knits a tight bond between the family, while in comparison, Luke's one man vigilantism just seems to show how disparate and scattered the family has become. The siblings have gone on to separate lives, the mother has remarried (not a spoiler unless you are worse at picking up hints than I am). Maybe it's meant to be an illustration of how close the brothers and sister are no matter time or distance, but it just did not work for me.
In fact, the whole New York thing was complete filler for me. Part of my problem is that the people in the present day, and to some extent those flashbacks occurring towards the end of the narrative, all talk like cretins. Look, people don't talk like that in real life. I can't describe how crazy it made me to read exchanges like this between Tom and Susan, the psychiatrist:
"You make jokes about your sister's psychosis. What an odd man you are!"and
"It's the southern way, Doctor."
"I must admit, Tom, that it irritates me every time you don your mantle of cultural yahoo intimidated by the big city. You're too smart a man to play that role very effectively."
"I'm sorry, Lowenstein," I said. "No one finds my role of New York debunker and cultural redneck more tiring than I do myself. I just wish it wasn't a cliche to hate New York, that it was a startling new doctrine originated by Tom Wingo."
I can't convey how ridiculous these exchanges sound to me (maybe they're perfectly normal and I'm the only one who found them to be as if aliens were trying to mimic actual human conversation) but let me attempt to describe it thusly: You know Life of Pi (just, bear with me)? And how in the end, people were arguing about whether or not the creatures in the boat were people or animals or just figments of Pi's imagination? It's like every character in Tom's adult life is a figment of his imagination, another aspect of him reflected in a mirror. That's why they all sound so similar. Similar and weird, because Tom is weird. And also because he's basically talking to himself.
Anyway.
The book is a glorious read, though, and Conroy has an artist's touch with the English language. And a very liberal hand with metaphor and simile. The flashbacks are ripe with description, overflowing with images:
[The undertaker] was tall and thin and had a complexion like goat cheese left on the table too long. The funeral parlor smelled like dead flowers and unanswered prayers. When he wished us a good day, his voice was reptilian and unctuous and you knew he was only truly comfortable in the presence of the dead. He looked as if he had died two or three times himself in order to better appreciate the subtleties of his vocation.How great is that?! So it baffles me that when they made the movie, they focused more on the present New York stuff than the flashback scenes (or so I've heard through the imdb grapevine), because the flashbacks are what make this book, man. They are awesome. Every chapter has new tragedies, each presents a new evil set against the family. Every event brings us closer to doooooooooom. Or, okay, maybe not, but it sure feels like it! TPOT builds wonderfully to its violent climax, like a train wreck you can see in the making.
TPOT has too many faults to be a great piece of literature, but it's definitely worth reading, and you will probably never forget it as long as you live. The lyrical tone of the writing balances nicely the grim events of the Wingo family. Although a more ridiculous final line, I have never read. I am not even going to spoil it, no matter how much I want to, and no matter that even if I did spoil it, it wouldn't matter because it doesn't make any more sense out of context than in! (okay, maybe a little more sense, but not much).
P.S. Poll time! Greatest improbability in the The Prince of Tides: the events of the SECRET, or the fact that Savannah got her version published as a children's book?
I mean, really.
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