Pat Conroy - "South of Broad"

South of Broad tells the story of Leopold Bloom King, named thus after the Ulysses character by his mother, a Joyce fanatic; a story told at two different points in his life: age 18 in 1969, age 38 in 1989. As the story starts in 1969, Leo is struggling to right his life. Ten years before, he’d found his older brother Steve dead by suicide in the bathtub, setting off a chain of psychiatric hospitals and eventually juvenile detention at 15 for possessing a large amount of cocaine. His relationship with his mother, a strict Catholic, is difficult because she is demanding and compares her unfavorably, so Leo thinks, to Steve her favored son. He has no friends his own age.

But he has some adult ones. As part of Leo’s rehabilitation, he works a paper route, allowing him to not only learn the ins and outs of his native Charleston, South Carolina, but to meet all the people of the city. He also works for free at an antique shop, helping a curmudgeonly man with various odds and ends, including caring for him when sick. In addition to these daily tasks, Leo’s mother meticulously plans his days to keep him out of trouble, and it is through this routine that one day Leo meets the eight people who will become most important to him in the future, setting in motion the next twenty years of his life.

And of course all this happens on June 16th, Bloomsday.

After a number of conflicts involving Leo’s new friends, including a violent one with a mysterious character fond of drawing red smiley faces as a calling card, the narrative jumps to 1989. We learn that Leo is still in Charleston, now working as a newspaper columnist. Not only is he best friends with all the people he met on Bloomsday 1969; he is even married to one. But the driving force of this timeline is the friend who got out of Charleston: Sheba Poe.

Sheba is now a famous, but already fading, movie star, who has come back to Charleston to engage her friends in a search for her lost twin, last seen in San Francisco dying of AIDS. Through this timeline, we see new conflicts, previous conflicts intensified, and perhaps some regrets on the part of Leo and his friends over choices they’ve made since 1969.

After Leo and Sheba’s quest in San Francisco, we return to 1969 to witness how all of these people became friends. (Something that will leave most readers scratching their heads, even after it’s shown.) And after that’s explained, we are shuttled forward to 1989 once again, where Hurricane Hugo wreaks havoc on Charleston and our story, which rushes home to its conclusion.

I alternated between loving and hating this book. One moment there would be the beautiful description or brilliant turn of phrase for which Conroy is rightly famous, but then, a few pages later, writing so amateurish I have no idea how it got past his editors. The finely woven plot was undone with a weak resolution to the most dramatic plot point. The dialogue that could be laugh out loud funny at times from the familiar yet merciless teasing the characters subject each other to was undermined by a tone that on occasion dominated the conversation so much as to be unbelievable.

But South of Broad redeems itself by being a book of large themes - life, faith, love- for which there are no solid answers. Leo seems even more disillusioned at 38 than he did at 18, which is perhaps normal, but surprising, given all the love there is in his life. Leo’s a man of strong faith, though there are things complicating his life, not least of which is fate, which brought all of the most important friends in his life to him on a single day, and all that meant for his life, good and bad. Okay, the fact that he met all six of his soon-to-be best friends on the same day could be called a coincidence. Yet one more thing wrong with the book. But all of these complications make Leo a great character. Probably even great enough to save this novel.