Lazy Book Review: "South of Broad" by Pat Conroy

Here's a new feature for the CW--and I call it the "Lazy Book Review". Lazy, because it follows no known format for book reviews (sorry Mr. Sharon), and is shorter than a professional review.

I take on today Pat Conroy's new novel "South of Broad", the author's first work of fiction since "Beach Music" in 1995. Full disclosure time: I am a HUGE Pat Conroy fan, and "Beach Music" remains my favorite non-classic work of fiction ever produced. Additionally, Conroy's eulogy of his father--the inspiration for "The Great Santini", remains one of the most perfect eulogies ever considered.

But I most confess, fourteen years without a novel hasn't done Conroy much good with "South of Broad", a formulaic, melodramatic, derivative work whose dredging up of recurring Conroy themes (mother-son conflict, mental illness, the life of a writer, etc) suddenly seems stale.

The basic problem I had with "South of Broad" was that it was for me exactly what critics of "Beach Music" have always said about it--too melodramatic, characters who were simply "too" pithy (a novel of Aaron Sorkin dialogue), too perfect, too well-formed and too predictable. Part of the predictability here is that so many of the characters in "South of Broad" are just re-treads (with different names) of the characters from Beach Music. Our protagonist is a Charleston features columnist (vice food/travel writer) who is just so darned lovable and reasonable. He's got a conflict with his mother, he's married a woman with mental illness who eventually kills herself (a la "Beach Music") , he's got a repressed love affair for the wife of the aristocratic punk (yep, both characters appear in both novels), and there's a maniacal father of a friend--in "Beach Music" a Marine General, here a killer/rapist--to boot.

Is it an enjoyable read? Yes. Conroy still knows how to turn a phrase and there are still places where you'll laugh openly and cry involuntarily. But this book is just too much like "Beach Music, except less so, for any Conroy fan to truly enjoy it. If you've never read Conroy, you might love this book. If you love Conroy, you'll wish he just kept writing non-fiction until something better came out of him.