Review of South of Broad

I recently completed reading South of Broad by Pat Conroy. Prior to this book, I have read five other Conroy novels: The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, My Losing Season, The Water is Wide, and Beach Music. All of these books succeeded in striking a deep chord in me, and in each of them I felt a strong connection between the narrator and myself. Conroy’s past books always seemed to be speaking just to me in some way, like he could have written them with me in mind. Even years after reading them, I think about passages from them in random moments, and get a glimmer of that moving feeling that only great art can give to you.

In contrast, South of Broad had a few moments here and there, but overall, it read like a caricature of his previous books. If the book had been written by the writers of Saturday Night Live lampooning the major themes and character types Conroy tends to write about, they would have hit home with South of Broad.

I was very excited when I first learned that Conroy had published a new novel, his first one in fourteen years, and couldn’t wait to read it. I was actually thrilled with the very beginning of the novel. His opening lines about the revered city of Charleston were classic Conroy.

I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk,” he writes. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael’s calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians. It comes to me as a surprising form of knowledge that my time in the city is more vocation than gift; it is my destiny, not my choice. I consider it a high privilege to be a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious. Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it approves of restraint far more than vainglory.


This is my favorite paragraph in the entire book. I find it typically overstated, but also carrying a sincere feeling that lets me see inside the soul of the narrator. But after this beginning, the book never measures up to expectations. The chief reason for this, in my opinion, is that the characters are too stereotypical and one-dimensional to be believed. There is Trevor, flamboyantly gay and a brilliantly talented pianist; his sister, Sheba, equally flamboyant and promiscuous who becomes a famous Hollywood movie star and seems like a mixture of Marilyn Monroe and Madonna made over. There is Leo’s mother, an overly strict and taciturn woman who withholds her love for poor Leo in the wake of his older brother’s death. She is a James Joyce aficionado, a former nun, and a stern principal. Leo’s father, of course, is as kind and understanding as his mother is stern, and serves as the saving grace of Leo’s otherwise awful childhood.

Then there is Ike, his best friend in high school, a star football player who becomes Charleston’s first black chief-of-police, and Chad Rutledge the Tenth, a Charleston blue-blood lawyer and snob and jerk of epic proportions. Leo’s older brother, Steve is a beautiful wonder boy in Leo’s eyes, and his unfathomable suicide is what sets the events of the book in motion. There is Leo’s damaged, personality disordered wife, Starla, a woman who appears only a handful of times in the entire novel and whose fate is painfully predictable. Finally there is the villain of the story, Sheba and Trevor’s psychopathic father, a shadowy, obsessed stalker without a true name or identity and Monsignor Max, a much revered priest whose importance in the story is not revealed until the very end.

Every character in the book is a stereotype in some form and Leo himself is the enlightened, selfless to a fault, tragic carbon copy of the narrator in many of Conroy’s other books, most exactly like Tom Wingo from The Prince of Tides and Jack McCall in Beach Music. It seems to me that Conroy has formed a formula for his books that worked for him and has stuck with it until it’s become painfully stale in his latest work.

The portion of the book that falls most flat, in my opinion, occurs when the group of friends goes to San Francisco in search of Trevor, who is dying of AIDS. Many of the exchanges between the groups of friends were downright painful to read in this section. They speak so sarcastically and downright mean to one another that it is hard to believe they are actually friends who share an unbreakable bond. I almost gave up reading this book all together here because it is filled with such blatant hyperbole and predictability. I only pressed on because of my appreciation of the author’s former works. After the friends return to Charleston, the story becomes more tolerable, but the dialogue remains painful. Every conversation is filled with corny zingers masquerading as wit, prompting much eye rolling and cringing from the reader. “Quit trying so hard, Pat!” I wanted to yell at him. As an aspiring writer myself, I think I would have been embarrassed to let anyone read a work of mine so filled with stereotypes and painfully unrealistic dialogue. I would have been moved to heavy revision, if not to trashing the whole thing and starting over.

The last section of the novel, after Hurricane Hugo ravishes Charleston, is the strongest part of a weak book. Here is where we discover the ironic, poetic fate of Sheba and Trevor’s father and we are told a moving story about God shedding a tear for the beautiful Sheba, setting the monstrous Hugo in motion. I loved the symbolism of this story as well as the symbolic scene of Leo and Molly, Chad’s wife and the narrator’s unrequited love, rescuing a grounded porpoise from the ruins of an old, beautiful Charleston home by carrying it back to the ocean for a fresh start on life.

In the end, I got a little taste of that moving feeling I’m accustomed to receiving from one of Conroy’s books, but was also disappointed that it came in such small doses against a backdrop of formulaic chatter. Although I would have to say this book is by far Conroy’s worst work, I also think it is a testament to him as a writer that I feel so compelled to examine and think about this book in spite of its many flaws. There is something about the author’s prose that drives me to read it even when it’s bad.