South of Broad [Deckle Edge] (Hardcover)

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Chris Bohjalian When I was on Page 322 of Pat Conroy's 514-page new novel, "South of Broad," I began to feel that the characters were crying a lot, which wouldn't have bothered me if the characters were children. They're not. So, I began noting in the margins each time an adult let loose with the waterworks. The finding? Characters cry, sob, tear, weep, wail and well up on the following pages: 322, 330, 340, 354, 367, 382, 393, 395, 396, 403, 418, 419, 420, 429, 439, 440, 444, 448 (twice), 452, 462, 463, 465, 466, 467, 477, 490 (twice) and 493. In addition to the main players in the novel, Meryl Streep is tearful on Page 447 and God weeps on Page 476. Bear in mind, these are only the tears I tracked in the last 200 pages of the tale. Hurricane Hugo, the storm that ravaged Charleston, S.C., in 1989 and figures prominently in the novel's final pages, might not have dumped quite as much water on the city as Conroy's characters. It's possible that the sobbing and sniveling occasionally felt inauthentic to me because I am a priggish New Englander who is uncomfortable with what may be a Southern penchant for drama. But as a novelist, I know all too well that there are few easier ways to wrest sniffles from a reader than to have a couple of real men cry like babies in each other's arms or a good woman stoically sniff back her tears. Been there, done that. In all fairness, "South of Broad" is a big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage -- and, perhaps, vintage Pat Conroy. In other words, a lot of that crying is justified. The tale begins on June 16, 1969, when high school junior Leopold Bloom King is asked by his mother, the school principal, to befriend some students who will be starting there the following September. That day he meets the companions he will take into adulthood: dirt-poor brother and sister orphans, Starla and Niles Whitehead, who are handcuffed to chairs; preternaturally charismatic twins Sheba and Trevor Poe; aristocratic brother and sister Chad and Fraser Rutledge, Carolinians of impeccable breeding; Chad's equally patrician girlfriend, Molly Huger; and Ike Jefferson, among the first African Americans to be integrated into the public school. They will all become the greatest of friends, class and race lines becoming irrelevant except as good-natured ribbing. As adults, Leo will marry Starla, Chad will marry Molly and Niles will marry Fraser. (Fans of the classic TV sitcom "Frasier" are going to pause on the title of Chapter 12. I know I did.) Sheba will go to Hollywood and become a movie star with a mouth like a sewer and the sort of libido that men always want in their women, while Trevor will go to San Francisco where he will become the toast of the gay community until he winds up HIV-positive. It would be impossible to summarize all that occurs to the group in this space, but suffice to say their adventures are extensive and, often enough, tear-jerking. They win (and lose) big football games, they venture to San Francisco to retrieve Trevor when he is ill, they try to protect themselves from Sheba and Trevor's psychotic killer of a father. Leo frets over his estranged wife, a woman damaged beyond repair by her childhood as an orphan. And then there's that hurricane. Meanwhile, adding a penumbra of sadness to Leo's story is the suicide of his elder brother. Leo was only 8 when he found his brother, "his arteries severed, dead in the bathtub we both shared, my father's straight razor on the tiles of our bathroom floor." Leo will spend a large chunk of his childhood first in mental institutions and then taking the fall for a crime he didn't commit. Much is made of the idea that Leo's mother has named him after James Joyce's Leopold Bloom and all of these friends find each other on the very day when Joyce's "Ulysses" is set. But "South of Broad" seems to be a reworking of the Joyce masterpiece only in that Leo learns "the power of accident and magic in human affairs . . . the unanswerable powers of fate, and how one day can shift the course of ten thousand lives." I should note that even though I felt stage-managed by Conroy's heavy hand, I still turned the pages with relish. Conroy is an immensely gifted stylist, and there are passages in the novel that are lush and beautiful and precise. No one can describe a tide or a sunset with his lyricism and exactitude. My sense is that the millions of readers who cherish Conroy's work won't be at all disappointed -- and nor will anyone who owns stock in Kleenex.
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