Beach Music by Pat Conroy

 

Summary (from the publisher): Pat Conroy is without doubt America's favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music, he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust.

Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his wife's suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister-in-law, who begs him to return home, and of two school friends asking for his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompasses the past and the present in both Europe and the American South, and that leads him to shocking--and ultimately liberating--truths.

Told with deep feeling and trademark Conroy humor, Beach Music is powerful and compulsively readable. It is another masterpiece in the legendary list of classics that his body of work has already become.

Review: Jack McCall is an American living in Rome with his young daughter, having fled his South Carolina home and family in the wake of his wife's suicide. Despite vowing to never return home, his mother's illness calls him home. There he realizes he has robbed his daughter of her family and history, makes peace with his wife's family and his own, and reconnects with high school friends. 

This was such a chaotic read that no summary could ever fully encompass. It felt as if Pat Conroy was throwing everything and the kitchen sink into this book. Around every bend was a horrific origin story filled with death and suffering, with plenty of hijinks such as terrorist shootings, suicide scenes, schizophrenic showdowns, childhood friends undercover as priests, teenagers lost at sea for weeks, dramatic Vietnam protestor arrest scenes, and much, much more. I had whiplash after the very first page, which was a novel unto itself. 

There were so many embedded stories within this story. Meaning that multiple times, the novel segued away from Jack to tell multiple horrific holocaust tales concerning people in his life. These were dark and gruesome stories. Knowing the characters' back stories helped explain the world in which Jack and his wife Shyla were raised but they were very time-consuming deviations from the main storyline. That being said, I enjoyed them perhaps more than Jack's storyline and was sad when the novel finally went back to his narration. In some ways, I wish the author had decided to write one of these background stories as a full novel instead. 

There was just so much going on here that I'm not really even sure how to review this. As if a tragic suicide, followed by his mother's illness wasn't enough to garner the reader's interest, the author felt the need to throw in the wild story of Jack's friend Jordan who is undercover in Rome. And if that isn't enough, what about Jack's old friend who works in Hollywood now and wants to write a movie about their childhood. And if THAT still isn't enough, what if he throws in some family drama and beef between Jack and his in-laws, who tried to steal custody of his only child from them - but only because of the terrible things they endured during the Holocaust? And if that isn't enough, why doesn't he make Jack's family utterly insane: a pack of sons (one of whom is seriously mentally ill), a drunk judge of a lawyer, and a mother who came from less than nothing and clawed her way to the top of South Carolina society. What a ride. I enjoyed several parts of this, but there were just too many parts. 

Stars: 3