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Summary
Summary
In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini , find some common ground at long last.
Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father's behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat's lifeline to a better world--that of books and culture. But eventually, despite repeated confrontations with his father, Pat managed to claw his way toward a life he could have only imagined as a child.
Pat's great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of Don Conroy's life, he and his son reached a rapprochement of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely doled out physical abuse to his wife and children refocused his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He defended his son's honor.
The Death of Santini is at once a heart-wrenching account of personal and family struggle and a poignant lesson in how the ties of blood can both strangle and offer succor. It is an act of reckoning, an exorcism of demons, but one whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to one of the most-often quoted lines from Pat's bestselling novel The Prince of Tides : "In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness."
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Conroy's memoir chronicles his relationship with his domineering fighter-pilot father, Donald Patrick Conroy, and the lifelong challenges he faced because of this father's emotional abuse, violence, and neglect. The author illustrates the complex intergenerational problems that were created by his father's conduct, including breakdowns and hospitalizations. Conroy himself deftly reads the book's introduction, but narrator Hill shines in this audio edition, delivering the highly emotional material in a way that will leave listeners exhausted by the end. Hill's reading is consistent, and he creates rich characters voices that are distinct and appropriate. A Nan A. Talese hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Conroy has long used his family to great success. The Great Santini (1976) was the portrait of his marine-obsessed fighter-pilot father and Conroy's long-suffering mother and siblings, who had to endure the violence, numerous moves, and great uncertainty created by his father. Don Conroy was from a Catholic family from the South Side of Chicago. Pat's revered mother, a real southern beauty, played by Blythe Danner in the movie, was the author's literary inspiration. She, as well as strong teachers, taught him the power of literature. His previous book, My Reading Life (2010), expands on these influences. Conroy does some name-dropping as the movie of The Great Santini had its premiere in Beaufort, South Carolina, Conroy's home, and Hollywood's biggest names turned out. In spite of the pain and cruelty, there was forgiveness, and a mature friendship was realized between Conroy and his father before the latter's death. Conroy's eulogy concludes the book and is a fine summing-up of a compelling and readable portrait of a dysfunctional family. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Conroy's many fans will be alerted to his new book by an extensive ad campaign and will welcome it for its honesty, power, and humor.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S A rare memoir that begins by telling you it's been told several times before, but that's the case with "The Death of Santini." The very title of Pat Conroy's latest book, alluding to his novel "The Great Santini," affirms that the abusive fighter pilot at the center of that story and the father mourned here are essentially one and the same. To dispel any lingering doubt, Conroy announces at the outset that the fictions he has spun over his long, celebrated literary career aren't really fictions. They're diamonds hauled up to earth and into the light of day from the dark and bottomless mine of his Southern clan: the tyrannical patriarch, the wounded matriarch, their seven self-destructive sons and daughters. We've met their alter egos and avatars, those of us who've supped contentedly on Conroy's big-flavored prose through the years. In "The Death of Santini," he more or less acknowledges that we'll simply be reintroduced to them by their real names. This admission turns out to be less a questionable sales pitch than a crucial signal, an indication of where the book is headed and what its principal distinction in the crowded genre of family exorcisms will be. Both on purpose and incidentally, "The Death of Santini" explores what it's like to write about loved ones who aren't shy about their reactions and what it's like for them to be written about. Conroy's subtitle, "The Story of a Father and His Son," is misleading, and not just because Donald Conroy disappears from these pages for long stretches, making room for the rest of the tortured clan. It's misleading because "The Death of Santini" is more the story of a son who turns the people closest to him into literary conceits, seeing them in terms of the vivid, florid characters they can become and have become, to their outrage and mortification, their thrill and aggrandizement. The book assumes its reader has traveled to it via "The Great Santini" and maybe also "The Prince of Tides" and "The Lords of Discipline," two of Conroy's other best-known novels. That's probably a safe guess, given how briskly they've sold, but it can come across as a self-flattering one, considering the way Conroy sometimes takes the measure of his oeuvre. Referring to the Citadel, the military academy that appears repeatedly in his work, he says, "I've ended up writing about my college as much as any writer in American history." That's one far-reaching statement. Conroy tends to paint in extravagant strokes, and "The Death of Santini" instantly reminded me of the decadent pleasures of his language, of his promiscuous gift for metaphor and of his ability, in the finest passages of his fiction, to make the love, hurt or terror a protagonist feels seem to be the only emotion the world could possibly have room for, the rightful center of the trembling universe. There's something quintessentially Southern about this, and Conroy is indeed a child of the South. Its mischief and melodrama are in his blood. Everyone in his world is larger than life, himself included. "In the myth I'm sharing I know that I was born to be the recording angel of my parents' dangerous love," he says toward the start of "The Death of Santini." His father, he writes, "thundered out of the sky in black-winged fighter planes, every inch of him a god of war." His mother, Peg, "could camouflage the blade of beauty in the folds of a matriarch's cape." Their marriage is violent and ugly, and it teaches him this about love: "It was a country bristling with fishhooks hung at eye level, man-traps, and poisoned baits. It could hurl toward you at breakneck speed or let you dangle over a web spun by a brown recluse spider." After that the writing is usually, but not always, less ornate, as "The Death of Santini" settles down to describe Conroy's escape from the battlefield of his parents' relationship to that of the Citadel, as well as his first efforts as a writer and his determination, with "The Great Santini," to capture and purge Donald Conroy's abusive dominion over his wife and kids. Its publication and transformation into a movie starring Robert Duvall are covered in the first quarter of the book, and they make for engrossing reading because the real-life Santini's shifting response to his son's public vivisection of him both conforms to and utterly contradicts what you'd expect. He's a complicated despot. BLYTHE DANNER IS assigned the screen version of Peg Conroy, and I mention this because it's clearly important to Peg, and to Pat: his mother is given the glamour she always wanted. Still she craves more, and toward the end of a grueling scene that describes the physical ravages of her leukemia, she implores Pat never to render her so ugly on the page, adding, "I'd like Meryl Streep to play the role." It's a funny, sweet and slightly creepy moment, overshadowed by what Pat quotes himself saying to her, supposedly aloud: "Oh, Mama, oh, mother of mine, you who opened up the universe for me with all the stuff of language, I'll make you so beautiful. Because you made me a writer and presented me the tongues and a passion for language, I can lift you off that bed, banish the cancer from your cells forever." He's promising her literary immortality, in dialogue that suggests he's taking certain liberties with the word-for-word truth. His self-consciousness can bleed into self-righteousness, as when he digresses to observe: "I trained myself to be unafraid of critics, and I've held them in high contempt since my earliest days as a writer because their work seems pinched and sullen and paramecium-souled." Adding that he vowed never to assume a critic's role himself, he says that "no writer has suffered over morning coffee because of the savagery of my review of his or her latest book, and no one ever will." Is it all that much kinder, though, to bring suffering to family members who can - and do - see enough of themselves in his novels to worry that the world is gaping at them? And to trot them out for yet another exhibition in "The Death of Santini"? He's grandly contemptuous of his sister Carol Ann, though if she's one-tenth as narcissistic as his description of her, she's earned it. She's certainly prime material. So, in a heartbreaking way, is his brother Tom, who at one point vanishes into the woods and plunges into some sort of trance, remaining so still, Conroy claims, that "deer used the sweat from his body as a salt lick." Some details defy belief, but Conroy's conviction pulls you fleetly through the book, as does the potency of his bond with his family, no matter their sins, their discord, their shortcomings. For a long while I was frustrated by the failure of "The Death of Santini" to illuminate precisely why, despite the wreckage Donald Conroy has wrought, and despite his continued cursing and insults, Pat keeps letting him through the door. But this puzzle is arguably the point of his book, which takes Santini to the bitter end, shakes off the ghost of him and recognizes that while fiction calls for lucid explanations and a certain tidiness, life resists both. FRANK BRUNI, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, is writing a book about sons and fathers.
Kirkus Review
One of the most widely read authors from the American South puts his demons to bed at long last. One doesn't have to have read The Great Santini (1976) to know that Pat Conroy (My Reading Life, 2010, etc.) was deeply scarred by his childhood. It is the theme of his work and his life, from the love-hate relationship in The Lords of Discipline (1980) to broken Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides (1986) to the mourning survivor Jack McCall in Beach Music (1995). In this memoir, Conroy unflinchingly reveals that his father, fighter pilot Donald Conroy, was actually much worse than the abusive Meechum in his novel. Telling the truth also forces the author to confront a number of difficult realizations about himself. "I was born with a delusion in my soul that I've fought a rearguard battle with my entire life," he writes. "Though I'm very much my mother's boy, it has pained me to admit the blood of Santini rushes hard and fast in my bloodstream. My mother gave me a poet's sensibility; my father's DNA assured me that I was always ready for a fight, and that I could ride into any fray as a field-tested lord of battle." Conroy lovingly describes his mother, whom he admits he idealized in The Great Santini and corrects for this book. Although his father's fearsome persona never really changed, Conroy learned to forgive and even sympathize with his father, who would attend book signings with his son and good-naturedly satirize his own terrifying image. Less droll is the story of Conroy's younger brother, Tom, who flung himself off a building in a suicidal fit of schizophrenia, and Conroy's combative relationship with his sister, the poet Carol Conroy. It's an emotionally difficult journey that should lend fans of Conroy's fiction an insightful back story to his richly imagined characters. The moving true story of an unforgivable father and his unlikely redemption.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Best-selling author Conroy, whose ten previous novels include The Great Santini (1976), The Prince of Tides (1987), and My Reading Life (2010), revisits the complicated relationship he had with his father, Don, in this intimate memoir that continues to explore the Conroy family history. Early fans of his work will recognize the repeated confrontations between father and son; Don was known as the Great Santini for his feats as a pilot in the U.S. Marines. The intention here is to offer readers the final chapter on Conroy's relationship with his parents and his own late-found peace, which came at a high cost. Verdict Conroy's work has influenced many younger writers and remains in top form. The author succeeds admirably with this memoir, which is sympathetic without being sentimental, offering stories with wry humor and heartfelt affection.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
