Pat Conroy is a lush, loquacious writer. His novels go on and on, like many of his sentences. I've just finished his most recent, South of Broad. This is vintage Conroy: the novel is set in Charleston, SC, the glories of which Conroy praises to exhaustion (the reader's, not his). The cast of characters is a set of good friends from a mix of races and social classes, their bonds forged in high school and tempered over the subsequent years by their shared efforts to look after each other. Needless to say (since this is a Conroy novel), there are endless heartaches and woes, lots of tears (on this point, see the funny comment by Chris Bohjalian in his review of the book at Amazon's website), and a constant tug-of-war between the forces of good and evil.
Much of the dialogue is witty, but there's an awful lot of race-based bantering that gets old pretty quickly. (Would people really keep that up for years?) Also, the book is chock-full of Catholic claptrap. The main character, Leo King, is a devout Catholic and his mother is a former nun, so not surprisingly, there's a lot of genuflection here to the wonder of the Church — too much, for my ex-Catholic taste. To his credit, however, Conroy wraps that particular theme up on a truthful and realistic note: a beloved Catholic priest in the story turns out to be a rapist of young boys.
The book certainly has its moments, and one can't help but admire Leo King; he is a good man, who has surrounded himself with good people (even if they are stock characters straight out of cheap cinema). Readers who like a brocaded style of writing will probably enjoy this book. I prefer fiction that is more subtle and economical.
Sense and Nonsense 