![]() When his mother visited him in Rome a few years ago, Conroy recalled during the interview, “She said she wanted to see Lourdes (the Catholic shrine in France). Religion coupled with a hazy knowledge of geography also has played a role in Conroy’s life. The Conroy family also has its share of religious zealots who left church feeling “bad if they came out without having kissed a rattlesnake on top of the head” and who have picketed his book-signing appearances to “beg people for the love of God not to buy my book,” the author said. When she was dying of cancer a couple of years ago, Conroy’s mother demanded to know if she was in the yet-to-be-published “The Prince of Tides.” After he conceded that she was, Conroy recounted that she responded by saying, “I’d like Meryl Streep to play the role.” As children hearing this story we would scream, ‘Tell him the wrong number, Mom.’ ”īecause several of his books not only have been optioned, but actually made into movies (“The Lords of Discipline,” “The Water Is Wide” filmed as “Conrack,” in addition to “The Great Santini”), Conroy told the booksellers that all his relatives now expect to be portrayed in movies. The bus started taking off and my father, in a foot race, went after her until my mother leaned out and screamed out the phone number. She got on, walked back, and sat down as my father pleaded for her number. He said he was going to die in the war very soon. My mother ignored him, as Southern girls are supposed to. My father pursued her, as Chicago Irishmen do. “While he was out on Peachtree Street hustling broads, as he so elegantly phrases it, my mother, 17 years old, crossed the street to catch a bus and walked into her hideous history. “My father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot, sent to Atlanta, Ga., during World War II,” he recounted. One that got a wide hearing earlier this year at the American Booksellers Assn. Over the years, Conroy has developed a standard repertory of stories about his family and himself. More importantly, Conroy added, his fictional family of shrimpers on the humid Atlantic Coast contains no more offbeat characters than his actual family, which is truly larger-and possibly stranger-than life. What seems implausible-a white dolphin, a captive Bengal tiger, a criminal who also is a giant, for example-to a critic in New York or Los Angeles, can be real in coastal South Carolina, he said. What reviewers haven’t taken into account, Conroy said, is that many of the events in the new novel are based on real life. Told of one particular bad review, Conroy shrugged again and said, “He probably wanted me to only write about the romance between the coach and the psychiatrist. Worse, they’ve asserted, the incidents and characters in the saga of South Carolina’s Wingo family are too fantastic, “sentimental” or “melodramatic” to be believed. Some reviewers of “The Prince of Tides” have complained that the book is too long and too larded with heaps of glistening, fatty prose. Conroy probably is best known-or at least recognizable-as the author of “The Great Santini,” a novel about a martinet military aviator and his long-suffering family, which was made into a movie by the same name starring Robert Duvall. It is exactly these supposedly Southern qualities that seem to have turned off some critics, both to “The Prince of Tides” and earlier works such as “The Lords of Discipline,” based on Conroy’s years at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C. He also is a man with the hefty build, appetites and passions of a good ol’ boy. Like his books, Conroy is most often expansive, a storyteller from the Southern mold. These statements are terse by Conroy’s usual standards. “They didn’t ask me,” he commented with a shrug during an interview. Even more puzzling, he added, was why the publisher gambled on a huge first printing of 350,000 copies for the 567-page novel. The novel, which recapitulates recent Southern history from school integration to industrial pollution and also includes many scenes set in 1980s New York, doesn’t seem made for that particular kind of success, Conroy said. “I don’t understand it,” Conroy said recently of his latest success, “The Prince of Tides” (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95), which moved on to national best-seller lists almost before it was published.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |