Beach Music
by Pat Conroy
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An American expatriate in Rome unearths his family legacy in this sweeping novel by the acclaimed author of The Prince of Tides and The Great SantiniA Southerner living abroad, Jack McCall is scarred by tragedy and betrayal. His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of show more the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.
Praise for Beach Music
“Astonishing . . . stunning . . . The range of passions and subjects that bring life to every page is almost endless.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Magnificent . . . clearly Conroy’s best.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Blockbuster writing at its best.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Pat Conroy’s writing contains a virtue now rare in most contemporary fiction: passion.”—The Denver Post
“A powerful, heartfelt tale.”—Houston Chronicle. show less
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This book covers so much; the holocaust, child abuse, suicide, the Catholic church; the Vietnam war, alcoholism; schizophrenia and loggerhead turtles. After the first couple of chapters, I thought that this was too much melodrama for me, and was ready to drop it. But I decided to give it one more chapter, and ended up hooked. Conroy brings out all the violins by the end, but I loved the book.
Here is a quote that I thought resonates with today:
"After the smoke had cleared, I promised myself I would never lose a friend because of something as subjective and slippery as political belief. "I'm an American," I announced to all around me. "And I get to think anything I want to and so do you by God, so do you." It became my credo, the central show more theme of my life, but if it had not been for the intolerance and pigheadedness I exhibited with such grandiosity in those years and the weird sideburns and holier-than-though-attitude that I paraded around with, I would have entered into my maturity as uninterested in the world of ideas as any other Southerner. My whole character formed around the issue of Vietnam and it nearly brings me to my knees to admit it." show less
Here is a quote that I thought resonates with today:
"After the smoke had cleared, I promised myself I would never lose a friend because of something as subjective and slippery as political belief. "I'm an American," I announced to all around me. "And I get to think anything I want to and so do you by God, so do you." It became my credo, the central show more theme of my life, but if it had not been for the intolerance and pigheadedness I exhibited with such grandiosity in those years and the weird sideburns and holier-than-though-attitude that I paraded around with, I would have entered into my maturity as uninterested in the world of ideas as any other Southerner. My whole character formed around the issue of Vietnam and it nearly brings me to my knees to admit it." show less
I know I'm going against the grain with this review, but I cannot stand Pat Conroy and the only reason I read this book is because it was a selection for my book group. This is the third book by Conroy that I have read & to me he writes the same book over and over again, mining the various dysfunctions of his own family. This book is no exception. You have insanity, alcoholism, brutal fathers,largely absent mothers and suicide. All of this is narrated by a character (largely Conroy's alter ego) whose main driving force seems to be to meet every problem in life with violent, and then talk about it in the most bloated, self-serving, bloated prose possible. Thankfully, this is the last book by this author that I will ever read.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Frank Muller, and the combination of his skillful reading and the poetic prose of Pat Conroy made listening to this book an emotional experience. I lost count of how many times this book made me laugh, cry, and reflect on my own life.
The story is beautiful and poignant and heart-breaking as it weaves between Rome, Italy and Waterford, South Carolina. There are several stories within the story, each one emotional and some even terrifying to comprehend.
The story is beautiful and poignant and heart-breaking as it weaves between Rome, Italy and Waterford, South Carolina. There are several stories within the story, each one emotional and some even terrifying to comprehend.
I first read this thirty or more years ago and thought it was wonderful then. This time I read it as an audiobook. The richness of the language is delightful and the story is filled with wonderful and I moving characters. I was deeply moved by the ending. I hadn’t been to Italy when I first read the book. I’ve had the good fortune to visit several times now and will be returning with a granddaughter in July. There is a lot of pathos and a lot of passion described in the story. The beach Music is in part the sound of surf that the baby loggerhead turtles transition to begin there life at sea.
This is a book to savor. The characters capture your heart with their humanity, flaws and all. I laughed, cringed, and cried while reading this. Laughter & warm moments are interwoven with the heavy topics in such a way that the reader experiences all the emotions of all the characters without the heaviness overshadowing the story. Peace and hope were the feelings I felt most upon finishing this book.
That Pat Conroy is not the most prolific writer in the world is an understatement. Longtime Conroy fans have grown accustomed to the several-year wait between his novels, and for them the publication of a new Pat Conroy novel is a big deal. I am one of those longtime Conroy fans myself but, for some unexplainable reason, I left Beach Music on the shelf for close to sixteen years before finally reading it this month. Perhaps it was just comforting to know that I had a “new” Pat Conroy novel waiting for me anytime I was ready for it. That is the closest I can come to explaining my decade-and-a-half wait.
Beach Music was worth that long wait.
Even casual fans of Conroy’s writing would recognize this 1995 book as a Pat Conroy novel. show more It focuses on another large, dysfunctional Southern family filled with over-the-top siblings and eccentric parents; the narrator’s high school friends are a uniquely memorable bunch (this time one of them is running for governor of South Carolina, one is a successful Hollywood producer, another is a writer, and one is a Catholic monk); and the book is as much about coastal South Carolina as it is about the people that live there.
Jack McCall and his friends came of age as university students when they and other South Carolina students could no longer ignore what was happening in Viet Nam - but the war that made them grow up nearly destroyed them in the process. Some relationships were ruined forever and others were salvaged only after the smoke finally cleared. Now those relationships seem to be coming full-circle as Jack McCall and his old friends are forced to relive the terrible days of protest, betrayal, and death they experienced two decades earlier.
After his wife jumped to her death from a Charleston bridge, Jack, a writer of cookbooks and travel guides, took his toddler daughter Leah to Rome in hopes of starting a new life for them there. During the several years they have been in Rome, Jack has cut off all contact with those he left behind in South Carolina, and Leah’s Southern heritage is acknowledged only through the tales and legends Jack uses as bedtime stories. But now Jack receives the only news that could force him to go home: his mother is dying of cancer and she wants to see him.
Ready or not, Jack is suddenly thrust back into the arms of his family and friends, many of whom are the very people that helped drive him away a decade earlier. He is almost overwhelmed by his larger-than-life brothers (one of whom is a mental patient), his alcoholic, former judge of a father, and his dying mother – and, he has to face his wife’s parents, whom he has not seen since they tried to take Leah away from him following their daughter’s suicide. If that were not enough, politician Capers Middleton and Hollywood producer Mike Hess, two of Jack’s closest childhood friends, are forcing him to relive the Viet Nam era events that emotionally crippled everyone in their small circle.
Beach Music is pure Pat Conroy. It is another passionate, larger than life, love story filled with memorable characters and side-stories that immerse the reader in a part of the country that Conroy so deeply loves. Pat Conroy is a Southern writer and he is proud of it. His is the generation most impacted, and most scarred, by the Viet Nam War and, in Beach Music, Conroy brings to vivid life the era that so terribly changed this country forever.
Rated at: 5.0 show less
Beach Music was worth that long wait.
Even casual fans of Conroy’s writing would recognize this 1995 book as a Pat Conroy novel. show more It focuses on another large, dysfunctional Southern family filled with over-the-top siblings and eccentric parents; the narrator’s high school friends are a uniquely memorable bunch (this time one of them is running for governor of South Carolina, one is a successful Hollywood producer, another is a writer, and one is a Catholic monk); and the book is as much about coastal South Carolina as it is about the people that live there.
Jack McCall and his friends came of age as university students when they and other South Carolina students could no longer ignore what was happening in Viet Nam - but the war that made them grow up nearly destroyed them in the process. Some relationships were ruined forever and others were salvaged only after the smoke finally cleared. Now those relationships seem to be coming full-circle as Jack McCall and his old friends are forced to relive the terrible days of protest, betrayal, and death they experienced two decades earlier.
After his wife jumped to her death from a Charleston bridge, Jack, a writer of cookbooks and travel guides, took his toddler daughter Leah to Rome in hopes of starting a new life for them there. During the several years they have been in Rome, Jack has cut off all contact with those he left behind in South Carolina, and Leah’s Southern heritage is acknowledged only through the tales and legends Jack uses as bedtime stories. But now Jack receives the only news that could force him to go home: his mother is dying of cancer and she wants to see him.
Ready or not, Jack is suddenly thrust back into the arms of his family and friends, many of whom are the very people that helped drive him away a decade earlier. He is almost overwhelmed by his larger-than-life brothers (one of whom is a mental patient), his alcoholic, former judge of a father, and his dying mother – and, he has to face his wife’s parents, whom he has not seen since they tried to take Leah away from him following their daughter’s suicide. If that were not enough, politician Capers Middleton and Hollywood producer Mike Hess, two of Jack’s closest childhood friends, are forcing him to relive the Viet Nam era events that emotionally crippled everyone in their small circle.
Beach Music is pure Pat Conroy. It is another passionate, larger than life, love story filled with memorable characters and side-stories that immerse the reader in a part of the country that Conroy so deeply loves. Pat Conroy is a Southern writer and he is proud of it. His is the generation most impacted, and most scarred, by the Viet Nam War and, in Beach Music, Conroy brings to vivid life the era that so terribly changed this country forever.
Rated at: 5.0 show less
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2390962.html
I liked Beach Music, much more than I liked Conroy's best-known work The Prince of Tides, but I felt it was not quite the sum of its parts. The parts are all pretty good, so this is not damning with faint praise: the experience of Catholics and Jews, both minority groups in of course rather different ways, in South Carolina in the period of the Vietnam War, with flashbacks to the lived experience of the Holocaust and also a narrative in the 1980s. The core pillar is the slow death of the narrator's mother; the descriptions of people and places - particularly Rome, which is beautifully conveyed - are all pretty compelling.
I liked Beach Music, much more than I liked Conroy's best-known work The Prince of Tides, but I felt it was not quite the sum of its parts. The parts are all pretty good, so this is not damning with faint praise: the experience of Catholics and Jews, both minority groups in of course rather different ways, in South Carolina in the period of the Vietnam War, with flashbacks to the lived experience of the Holocaust and also a narrative in the 1980s. The core pillar is the slow death of the narrator's mother; the descriptions of people and places - particularly Rome, which is beautifully conveyed - are all pretty compelling.
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Author Information
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Pat Conroy is the pen name of Donald Patrick Conroy, who was born in Atlanta, Georgia on October 26, 1945. He received a B.A. in English from The Citadel in 1967. After teaching high school at his alma mater, he accepted a job teaching disadvantaged black children in a two-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. Many of show more the children were illiterate, unable even to write their own names. He taught them using oral history and geography lessons. His experience on Daufuskie Island formed the basis for his first successful memoir, The Water Is Wide, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award from the Cleveland Foundation and was made into the movie Conrack starring Jon Voight in 1976. His novels include Beach Music and South of Broad. Several of his novels were adapted into movies including The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and The Prince of Tides. He also wrote several works of non-fiction including The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life, My Reading Life, and The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 4, 2016 at the age of 70. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Beach Music
- Original title
- Beach Music
- Original publication date
- 1995-07
- People/Characters
- Jack McCall; Shyla McCall; Leah McCall
- Important places
- South Carolina, USA; Rome, Italy
- Important events
- Vietnam War
- Dedication
- This book is dedicated to my three brothers: Michael Joseph, James Patrick, And Timothy John - loyalists and life-sharers. And to Thomas Patrick; our hurt brother and lost boy, who took his own life on August 31, 1994.
- First words
- In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Because she had promised it and because she had taught me to honor the eminence of magic in our frail human drama, I knew that Shyla was waiting for me, biding her time, looking forward to the dance on the beach that would last forever, in a house somewhere beneath the great bright sea.
- Original language
- English
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- Reviews
- 67
- Rating
- (3.95)
- Languages
- 12 — Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 53
- ASINs
- 28