"It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River"

Over the summer i read:
The White Queen - Philippa Gregory
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Saving Francesca (for the ninth time) - Melina Marchetta
The Wish Maker - Ali Sethi
South of Broad - Pat Conroy
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Jane Eyre (most of it) - Charlotte Bronte
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Isabel's Bed - Elinor Lipmann
Norah Jane - Ellen Gilchrist

The title of this entry is the opening line of South of Broad by Pat Conroy, and perfectly sets the tone for Conroy's part memoir, part love letter to the city of his birth.The novel is one of the most profound and engrossing books I've read not only this summer but in a long, long time. I've been reading a lot about the South lately - I'm fascinated by the history and sensuality and light-dark complex of Spanish moss and Victorian houses and Carolina drawls (Berendt's Midnight and Gilchrist's Norah Jane also took place down south). The book's setting of Charleston in the 1960's and then 1980's feels like another world. Maybe it's my culture envy - i love the sense of tradition and identity as a Southernor (minus all of the negative past connotations and responsiblities that go along with it) - Conroy's characters all share a common bond, even if it is as the loser's of the "War of Northern Aggression". The novel is narrated by Leopold Bloom King, son of a nun-turned-Joyce-scholar, paper boy for all of Old Charleston (the area south of Broad Street), and later the premier columnist in the city's newspaper. His story flips back and forth in time, weaving together his 18th and 38th summers and various other anecdotes about his family and friends - 8 Charleston outcasts who banded together during their senior year in high school and twenty years later when tragedy strikes. Modern issues of mental illness, racism, the outbreak of AIDS in San Francisco among homosexuals (including on of their own), abuse, and chronic dissatisfaction seem hyperrealistic in the setting of shady streets winding past houses hundreds of years old.

The novel is poignant and relevant, funny and touching, heartbreaking and heart warming. Ultimately, it is the loss of three of the nine that reminds them all why they first came together. I couldn't put it down - I read all five hundred some pages in less than two days. The story is engrossing and the style impecable, and it's definitely one of the best books I've read. I liked the "us against the world" mentality of the characters and the artful skill with which Conroy sneaks in observations about family, heartbreak, tradition, memory, and growing up. Towards the end of the book, one line struck me as especially poignant and honest:
"It was the least I could do (holding his friend's hand), as he had long ago taught me a lesson about the great inner strengthe sometimes granted to the most wounded of men. And how those men can sometimes grow up to be heroes." It's especially fitting, because South of Broad is a story about what wounded quite a few men (and women), and how they all managed to grow up to be heroes. (467)