South of Broad

by Pat Conroy

Ebook, 2010

Library's rating

Library's review

It's been quite a while since I've read a Pat Conroy novel, and I was happy to see that he has lost none of the ability to capture my imagination with his vividly drawn characters. In South of Broad, the city of Charleston is as much or more of a character than any of the people who inhabit it. I
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 have never been to Charleston, but I can't imagine visiting without taking this book along to put me in the scene. I had somewhat of a hard time understanding how this particular group of friends managed to remain friends for more than 20 years given their internal frictions with each other, but Conroy's masterful writing and plotting managed to overcome this flaw. The denouement was satisfying, if not quite as shocking as Conroy may have hoped (I had guessed the big twist early on). I'm looking forward to backtracking and picking up the Conroy books I missed between Beach Musicand this one.
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Tags

fiction, 20th century, American South, South Carolina, Charleston, adolescence, friendship

Genres

Collection

Read but unowned

Description

Leopold Bloom King, the narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death. Eventually he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.… (more)

Media reviews

Open Letters Monthly
Conroy thanks his editor Nan A. Talese in his acknowledgments, but South of Broad merely adds urgency to the question of what it is this woman does, exactly, apart from pick up the tab.
— 3 more
The New York Times Book Review
Conroy remains a magician of the page. As a writer, he owns the South Carolina coast. But the descriptions of the tides and the palms, the confessions of love and loss, the memories “evergreen and verdant” set side by side with evocations of the “annoyed heart” have simply been done better
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 — by the author himself.
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Bloomberg
Conroy is an entertaining storyteller -- he has a corker of a final twist here -- yet much of “South of Broad” shows a weakness for emotional fireworks, two-dimensional characters and rough or purplish prose.
Los Angeles Times
Conroy reels his teenage characters through cliché showdowns of racial and class divisions, trying to make those broad social issues the backdrop to the personal stories in the narrative -- including the recurring presence of the shadowy and vicious Poe father. But Conroy doesn't have anything new
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 or interesting to say about the racial and class divides. And too many of his characters are set up as types instead of fully fledged people, incapable, at times, of anything more than the most mundane of dialogues.
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Awards

ALA Over the Rainbow Book List (Selection — Fiction — 2011)

Language

English

Original publication date

2009-08-11

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