I wanted to like Pat Conroy’s Beach Music. Really, I did. The opening paragraph (a stunning, lyrical evocation of a young woman’s suicide) drew me into the sprawling, eight hundred page tome. At first glance, the book seemed to have all the elements of a rip-roaring good yarn: betrayal, forgiveness, intergenerational conflict, and a number of love affairs thrown in for good measure. At the story’s start, we meet main character Jack McCall, who (with only his daughter, Leah, for company) is living in voluntary exile in Rome, after his wife Shyla’s suicide some years before. Shyla’s death resulted in a bitter custody battle over Leah between Jack and Shyla’s parents. Now, Jack hopes to raise his daughter as an Italian, with no knowledge of his native South or of the family that threatened to tear them apart.However, Jack’s fragile peace is not to last. Through a series of preposterous circumstances (a private eye trails Jack and Leah through much of the novel’s first few chapters), Jack is forced to confront his past and, eventually, return to his home state of South Carolina. This is where the story began to lose me. Just when things should have been getting good, the narrative fell apart. Instead of a single inciting incident, we get three: the private eye, it seems, was hired by Shyla’s sister, Martha, who wants Jack to return home and reunite with Shyla’s father, who may or may not have previously-unrevealed insights into Shyla’s suicide. At the same time, Jack’s old friend, Mike Hess (now a wildly-successful film producer), pops up out of nowhere with Jack’s former girlfriend, Ledare, in tow. Mike, you see, also wants Jack to return home, though his motivations are somewhat different. Mike hopes that Jack will sign on to a new project of his, a movie about their South Carolina childhoods, and (at the same time) provide information about a mutual friend, Jordan, who died (or, some say, disappeared) after a Vietnam War protest gone bad. As if that weren’t enough, Jack also receives a phone call from his brother, Dupree, announcing that their mother has leukemia and Jack is wanted at home. It’s a lot to keep track of, and Beach Music lacks the narrative structure necessary to make these disparate elements hang together. My main complaint regarding this book was that Pat Conroy seemed hell-bent on packing as many increasingly-strange tangents into its pages as possible, while giving no thought whatsoever to what these episodes had in common or what kind of story they were supposed to tell.Beach Music does not lack for memorable scenes. Still vivid in my mind’s eye (a month or more later) is an astonishing episode in which a teenage Jack and his friends Jordan and Capers Middleton are stranded at sea for fifteen days after a manta ray destroys their motorboat. These scenes had me glued to the pages, in suspense, and would have made a terrific short story. But they have no relation whatsoever to the overall arc of the novel. Also excellent are a scene in which Jordan (at twelve, the abused, terrified child of a Marine Corps Colonel) achieves a moment of quiet courage in a psychiatrist’s office and the truly heroic struggle of Jack’s mother, Lucy McCall and her brother, Jude, to escape the brutal poverty of their childhood. Yet, as I turned the book’s final pages, I was left wondering what exactly happened. I’m still not sure what the overall point of the novel was or how these scenes related to each other.Compounding my dislike for the book are the main characters themselves. I’m all about flawed characters, but not one of the people populating Conroy’s novel came across as likable or even very sympathetic. In particular, Jack McCall himself came across as a big, overgrown child. A scene in which he launches into a screaming tantrum at his dying mother almost made me throw the book down in disgust and I failed to share his happiness at his eventual coming-to-terms with his past. This occurs during a ludicrous mock trial at the end of the book. Staged by Jack’s friend Mike, for a bizarre home-movie, the main characters come together on stage to tell their version of the events that eventually drove them apart. In the book, it’s every bit as corny and overwrought as it sounds. While reading this climax (supposedly a moment of grief and reconciliation for all concerned), I was left rolling my eyes, wondering why one character, in particular, would chose to incriminate himself during a trial with no legal baring, whatsoever. Beach Music might be worth reading if what you’re after is sheer entertainment or a way to kill time, but don’t commit to its eight hundred-plus pages expecting to bond with its large cast of characters or a satisfying resolution at the end. After such greats as The Lords of Discipline, Beach Music is a disappointment from Conroy, from whom I’ve come to expect much more. Certainly, it’s not a book I’ll be recommending or returning to anytime soon.
While competently written and quite entertaining, Beach Music tries to be too many books in one. I didn't think the various aspects of the story resonated with each other enough to belong in the same book. I felt that Conroy could have written three tighter novels with the material he packed into this one loose one. For example, the long backstory about Lucy's childhood, while interesting, could have been shortened considerably or left to the imagination. It was enough to know she wasn't "of good breeding" and had gone to great lengths to compensate. The Great Jew's childhood story also seemed to belong in another book, as well. All these separate characters' stories gave the novel the feeling of a series of vignettes instead of a tightly wound together whole. For me, the novel was all over the place. A better writer would have either cut some of it out or done a better job of weaving it all together. That said, there were certainly parts of the novel that sang. They could have stood alone as short stories. One such part was the episode when Jack and his best friends get lost at sea as teenagers. Another was the chapter in which Lucy teaches Leah how to dig up the Loggerhead Turtle eggs and re-bury them in safer territory. Unfortunately, as I stated above, each of these vignettes could have belonged in different novels or been published as short stories.Lastly, I want to remark on one major irritant in this novel: the too-snappy dialogue. Jack's often ascerbic banter with his childhood friends when they re-encounter each other in Italy and in S. Carolina comes off contrived and movie-dialoguish. He always seems to have the perfect wiseacre come-back for every situation, and I found it rang false. A less posturing, more self-effacing and insecure Jack McCall would have seemed more realistic. No one is ever on such a witty roll every time they speak.
What do You think about Beach Music (2002)?
Prince of Tides is a masterful novel. When I find a phenomenal writer, I read through everything I can get my hands on. Eventually, the books no longer live up to my expectation. I wonder if I tire of the style or if fame leads to a pressure to produce something...anything...quickly so that the last book is truly are not as good. If I read this first, would I have loved it as much as Prince of Tides or Lords if Discipline? His writing is great still but the story doesn't seem as tight but, I just don't know.
—Barbara
I was initially skeptical about starting up one of these "blockbuster" novels, but Beach Music's prologue was surprisingly well written and I found myself strangely captivated to read on. As a testament to the quality of that prologue, I waded through a couple hundred pages of overwrought and overweight storytelling just to find some closure on the Jack McCall's wife's suicide mystery. There would be times in my reading when I had to look away from the book because the prose would be so sentimental and contrived it was painful. For example, "At certain times in our lives, we crackled in the sheer electricity of our desire to be wonderful in bed...We set down feasts for each other and treated our loves with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us." I don't want to meet the people who think this is an example of good writing. However, Pat Conroy manages to tie all of the dozens of back-stories and personal dramas that he had been casting out together again near the two-thirds mark in the book. At that point, he thankfully backs off from trying to be an impressive writer and just settles in to being a capable storyteller. The highlights of that story for me were George Fox telling Jack about his experience in the Holocaust, the episode of Jack and his three friends stranded at sea, and Lucy McCall's childhood. I cringed whenever Jack would banter with his three indistinguishable brothers and one schizophrenic brother, and the Jordan Elliott story line could never lift all the narrative weight it was expected to shoulder. I made it through all 768 pages not because I found Jack's healing process credible, not because I found the South Carolina backdrop endearing, not because I really cared why Shyla committed suicide, but because I was impressed by how Conroy brought all of the disparate parts of the story into a working whole. I won't read another Pat Conroy novel because there is too much good literature out there, but reading Beach Music was not a waste of my time.
—Matthew
I love almost anything by Conroy, but this - in my humble opinion - is his greatest masterpiece. My husband used to read this book to me when we were dating (he in Colorado and I in Athens, GA), and when we ran out of things to talk about, he would read to me about Jack McCall. Conroy tells some beautiful (albeit sometimes, heavy)stories. He paints gorgeous pictures of Italy, South Carolina, and some heartwrenching tales of the life of a man trying to escape his past. My favorite moment in the book, by FAR, is the depiction of Jon-Hardin holding all of his brothers hostage at the top of the Silas Pearlman Bridge (I think that's the right bridge...). I don't want to ruin it for you, but if you ever read it, you can know that that is my favorite part :)
—Ashley
