BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: The Prince of Tides (Pat Conroy, author)
Literary fiction, family saga, family secrets, siblings, twins, parental abuse and neglect, sexual assault, South Carolina, New York, psychiatry, mental illness, suicide attempt, veteran, small town.
The Prince of Tides is a redolent, decades-long, family saga steeped in the sights, sounds and smells of the low country of coastal South Carolina. It is the story of the Wingo family-parents Lila and Henry, eldest brother Luke and twins, Tom and Savannah. The Wingos are deeply flawed. Lila and Henry are parents who both love and wound one another and their children. Henry physically abuses his children and Lila emotionally torments them with her own dissatisfaction, regret, and longing. The three siblings develop a bond of mutual self-preservation and protection to weather the vicissitudes of their childhood. The story, told in Tom’s voice, is of his healing over decades.
When the novel opens, Tom is summoned to New York to try to save his sister after her latest suicide attempt. He departs South Carolina on the heels of his wife’s admission that she has fallen in love with someone else and is having an affair. Tom purports to loathe New York City, the glaring antithesis to the gentility of the South, but his bond to Savannah is stronger than either his distaste for New York or the drive to save his marriage. During his stay there, he comes to appreciate the urban beauties hidden in the vertical city.
In New York, Tom finds Savannah in a mute and catatonic state. He meets Savannah’s psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Lowenstein, as he calls her, insists that to help Savannah, Tom must recount to her their childhood, so that together they can decode Savannah’s ramblings and the voices in her mind which are unintelligible to Lowenstein. Tom proceeds with caution, and carefully metes out the tales of their troubled childhood. He exposes the depth of his love for his homeland, revealing as he does so, the origins of the magical imagery at the heart of Savannah’s poetry. In these memories, Conroy conveys a lyrical sense of place. The Prince of Tides oozes geographically specific and evocative imagery in the tradition of East of Eden, or Where the Crawdads Sing. Conroy writes,
To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, “There. That taste. That’s the taste of my childhood….Breathe deeply, and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater. My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.”
Tom sketches his family’s history for Lowenstein, including the abuse the siblings suffered. Yet, even the villains of their childhood are not all bad. Tom recognizes and admires his father’s love for the lowcountry marshes, a passion he inherits. He sees his mother’s deep flaws but simultaneously credits her for the immutable gifts of imagination, an appreciation for the natural world and a nimbleness with rich and poetic language she bestows on her children,
Each day she would take us into the forest or garden and invent a name for any animal or flower we passed. A monarch butterfly became an “orchid-kissing blacklegs”; a field of daffodils in April turned into a “dance of the butter ladies bonneted.” With her attentiveness my mother could turn a walk around the island into a voyage of purest discovery. Her eyes were our keys to the palace of wildness.”
In the crucible of this childhood, Savannah becomes a poetic genius, with the madness to accompany it. Tom spends his childhood in the thrall of the natural world. And Luke becomes a warrior. Tom is ever watchful and indefatigable in his dedication to protect and save his sister from her demons. Growing up he converts his own pain into an acerbic wit and a thirst for literature and beauty.
The Wingos’ world is populated not only with natural beauty, but with colorful small town characters. Mr. Fruit, dancing with demons of his own, directs traffic in town, unbidden by any official request. Henry Wingo’s father, Amos, is a religious zealot who sells Bibles door-to-door, spouts scripture in every conversation and carries a massive wooden cross through town every Good Friday. Henry’s mother, Tolitha, left Amos for a period of years, to live in Atlanta as another man’s wife, never disclosing her marriage to Amos, and returned after her lover died, unapologetically resuming her life with Amos. There is a town bully, Oscar, the son of a wealthy and capacious banker, and a magical and rare white dolphin whom outsiders capture for a Florida aquarium, compelling the Wingo siblings to embark on a road trip to rescue and release it. Because the novel encompasses decades, it is filled with the dozens of delicious vignettes that make their small town come to life.
As Tom unwinds the story of the Wingos, he grows closer to Lowenstein, and she allows him into her personal life. Susan is lonely and unhappy in her marriage. Dueling failing marriages notwithstanding, Tom and Susan begin to fall in love. Tom’s telling of his childhood story and Lowenstein’s deep listening and nurture begin to heal Tom. Though Lowenstein is Savannah’s psychiatrist, Tom’s wounds and pain are no less deep and life-altering; his are just deeply buried and defended.
Tom’s disclosure of his family’s secrets, including Lila’s and Henry’s, proceeds at a riveting and artful pace. The tortured history of this colorful cast of characters unfolds in precisely the doses the reader can bear, and in increments which leave the reader craving more and barreling forward in search of the elusive core secrets of the Wingo family. The penultimate cataclysmic event is so graphic, so violent and so life-altering that it cannot be revealed in a review; it must be experienced in the course of the novel first-hand. That said, it accounts for all of the essential pieces of the siblings’ personalities and dysfunction that would otherwise be simply idiosyncratic. There is a synchrony to the reveal that is like the final chord of a symphony that sounds after a tumultuous discordant passage.
As the novel winds down, healing rises like the tide. It is in the telling of his story and the sharing of his pain that Tom is healed. Luke’s story is as tragic as Savannah’s and her ability to heal is uncertain. In Tom, and in the telling, there is hope. The salve of love and listening, and the comforts of family and home, are the ties that bind and heal. The Prince of Tides is a deeply satisfying epic family saga–the kind that leaves one determined to read it again and again, and to go in search of other novels that meet this standard of literary excellence.
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