A disproportionate amount of my reading time in January was taken up with Pat Conroy’s best selling novel, Beach Music. It wasn’t because the book was so long – coming in at more than 600 pages – as I’ve read longer books in much less time than it took me to read Beach Music. But the first 200 pages were so excruciatingly slow for me to get through, taking about two weeks before I finally made it over that hurdle. From there, the reading got easier and I actually began to enjoy myself. But those first 200 pages … whew! If I didn’t have to read it for book club, I would have put it aside long before I reached that point. And I would have missed out on a good story, which would have been a shame. For those first 200 pages, I didn’t like ANY of the characters, I didn’t care about their life stories, and Conroy had a maddening habit of alluding to tragic and mysterious pasts without actually TELLING us anything for far too many chapters. And boy, does the man love his metaphors! But once he finally got around to it, he told a whopper of a tale. There is so much going on in this book, a lot of it tangential to the the plot(s) and everything is extreme; absolutely nothing is understated or even ordinary. So while I was enjoying myself, another part of me was just wishing he would get on with it and cut out a lot of the book’s flotsam and jetsam, as beautifully told as it was, and perhaps while he was at it, tone it down a notch or two.

The story itself focuses on Jack McCall, a South Carolinian and father of a young daughter, Leah, who flees to Rome, Italy after his wife’s suicide, attempting to escape both the painful memories and the clutches of his parents-in-law, who had tried to obtain custody of Leah after their daughter’s death. Cutting off all ties to his family, he tries to forge a new life for himself and his daughter. But the past comes calling, and it isn’t long before Jack is back in Charleston, opening up all the closets and finding the family skeletons, while he spars with his brothers and watches his mother battle leukemia. Mix in the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, along with a whole host of other issues, including schizophrenia, murder, alcoholism, all kinds of abuse and even the plight of Loggerhead turtles, and you have yourself a heady, overwhelming extravaganza of a novel, one that sadly culminates in a contrived, anti-climactic denouement that felt rushed and not in keeping with the rest of the sprawling story. There are moments, passages, even whole chapters of brilliance and captivating storytelling, but on the whole, I wanted both less and more from this book.

Even though my reaction to this book is mixed, I did like it enough to want to read more by Pat Conroy. And many people love his books and loved Beach Music - judging from the majority of Amazon reviews and the many people I’ve encountered who sing his praises. I’m not won over by Pat Conroy, though – at least not yet.

Applicable Reading Challenges: Support Your Local Library, 100+ Reading Challenge

Book Rating: 3: Decent, but didn’t grab me in a big way.

FTC Disclosure: I borrowed this book from the library.