South of Broad
2009 • 514 pages
Ratings5
Average rating3.4
15
Ratings5
Average rating3.4
The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our 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, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when 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. The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for. South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest; a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds.From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews with the most likes.
I'm finding this book extremely hard to get into. I finally gave up, but then a couple of people I know said it's worth another try. One of them loved it. One of them really liked it, but had to force herself through the slow beginning. So, soon I will jump in again and see how it goes.
For once, I'm recording my impression immediately after finishing a book. The reason is that basically the end of the book left me with a surprising amount of energy and desire for action. I'm sitting here questioning how much I should believe that, but it's hard not get caught up in Conroy's characters' feelings. Leo's triumph and nice, novelistic ending is not one that I necessarily think I can achieve, but it still manages to leave me feeling good. I'd say this is typical of the book as a whole, where an entire cast of characters appears and moves around in a way that - while not predictable exactly - lends itself to feeling like it's on rails, with just a hint too much deus ex. I don't feel that seriously harms the novel though for me; I take it with an understanding of suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment is conscious rather than consuming.
