Yelling at a book to make it stop

South of Broad, Pat Conroy's first work of fiction in fourteen years is an overwrought, over dramatic story with unrealistic relationships and implausible dialogue. I wanted to like this book, and had been looking forward to it for many months, years even.



It tells the story of Leopold Bloom King, a young man waking up to the world around him after his brother's suicide at the age of ten. Conroy bombards us with many irritating references to James Joyce, since King's Mother, a former nun, wrote her dissertation on Joyce and named both of her sons after characters in Joyce's novels.

Conroy piles on the glib, adds three metaphors when one powerful one would suffice, fills us up on the melodrama and impossibility of fact in chapter after chapter. He even names two of his characters Niles and Fraser, and they marry. Isn't that precious?

Every part of a dysfunctional family is in this books five hundred plus pages. Want rape, incest, suicide, AIDS, forbidden love, disease, drug dealing, alcoholism, murder, racism - it's all here and Conroy buries us in heaping mounds of sadness balanced by face slapping banter.

And when a major character dies (I really do not think I'm giving anything away here) none of the characters friends barely goes through any grief stage. Yet, when there's any other scene in which even a minor tragedy occurs, there is weeping, howling and sobbing.

The final chapter, in which the reason King's brother commits suicide is revealed has become of the most used cliches in recent history, (it wasn't the butler, but it should have been) I felt sadness, not for any of the characters, but for me reading this, and for Conroy for having to stoop to write this nonsense. I expected better from him, and got a third rate paperback from the remainder bin.