Wednesday, October 20, 2010

America's Best Novelist?

I want to tell you about a truly wonderful book, Pat Conroy's Beach Music. It is about love. The characters are so amazingly well developed. A man loses his wife to suicide, then raises his daughter, whom he adores. There is alcoholism, the Viet Nam war, the Holocaust, the sixties, the Jewish and Catholic faiths, mountain folks and "well bred" city folks, life-long friends, Hollywood; all seen through real experiences of the characters in the novel. If there is a better novel about American life in that time period, I am not aware of it. Never for one second did I get to a boring part. It flows from heavy to light and back to heavy again, but never boring. You do not want to miss one sentence.

Before reading Beach Music, I read Conroy's South of Broad, which takes place in Charleston, South Carolina. Once again the character development was superb, as was the story line. Thank you, Pat Conroy!

No comments: