Last night, I finished Pat Conroy’s epic novel, “The Prince of Tides”. Pat Conroy is now my new favorite author. I loved this book.

More precisely, I was moved by this book. Touched by it. There are times that I thought that his prose was rather dense and long, but the stories told in the novel are brilliantly woven together. The characters leap off the page and sit down on the couch next to you. You can see where they are, you can smell the flowers coming in through the window and hear the waves crashing on the shores of South Carolina.

This book chronicles the lives of the Wingo family as told by Tom Wingo. His sister, Savannah is in a mental hospital in New York after her most recent suicide attempt. Tom goes to New York and works with Savannah’s psychiatrist to try and figure out how to save Savannah from herself. He does this by telling Dr. Lowenstein every gruesome, heart-wrenching story from their childhood.

The childhoods of the Wingo children were not pretty. There are many stories that were painful to read, but also many that were beautiful. This book is a story of survival. A story of loss and grief. This is a story of the madness of a poet. The ambition of a housewife. The brutality of a shrimp boat captain. The helplessness of a man who has forgotten how to live. And a story about a brother who believes the world is a better place than it is.

This book was beautiful and a pleasure to read. I would like to provide a paragraph for you to enjoy. To give a sense of what descriptive writing this is.

“It was growing dark on this long southern evening and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold… The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, the depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks. The moon then rose quickly, rose like a bird from the water, from the trees, from the islands, and climbed straight up- gold, then yellow, then pale yellow, pale silver, silver-bright, then something miraculous, immaculate, and beyond silver, a color native only to southern nights.”

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it isn’t that his prose is too dense, because the prose is beautiful. Perhaps is is more that the characters are so interesting, and the foreshadowing was so intense, that I had a hard time slowing down to enjoy the poetry of the prose at times, because I desperately wanted to know what would be revealed next. Patience is not one of my strong points when reading.

I think Pat Conroy is a poet novelist and I look forward to exploring more of his collection. I also appreciate him specifically as a Southern writer. Though the south of South Carolina and that of Arkansas are not the same, his writing still touches a place in my heart that makes me think of my homeland. Makes me long for the South. I think he provides a perspective that makes the South more understandable to people not from it. Half of the story in this book takes place in NYC. I think that through the comparisons and parellels between the two places, the author comes to show us that everyone is damaged. Everyone has problems.  We are all just people trying to figure out what we are supposed to be doing and that applies to the Park Avenue Manhatten-ite as much as it does the shrimp boat captain.

Go get the book. Discover your new favorite author.