Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1892521 in Books
• Published on: 1993-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 209 pages

Customer Reviews

Good, but I wonder why it got the Pulitzer
I enjoyed this subtle tale of revenge. Much hinges on the move from Nashville and Memphis and the difference between the two cities. Taylor tells the story in a circular style: first he tells the story in a few pages - all the majot characters appear very early on. Then he tells the story again with more detail, and continues like this, widening the circle of information each time, dropping in new facts which alter what you already know and change everything again slightly. Then he tells it again, adding more facts. Lovely book, glad I read it, but not of the usual Pulitzer calibre in my opinion.

Restrained and dignified look at a family's troubled history
Winner of 1987's Pulitzer Prize, this genteel and very old-fashioned tale of a troubled family is more in the tradition of Eudora Welty than that of Jonathan Franzen. Filtering the whole story through the eyes of Philip Carver, a collector of antique books in his late 40's, the author startles the reader by making no effort whatsoever to involve him vicariously in the action, something we now take for granted in modern fiction. Instead, he requires the reader to get to know Philip through his first-person narrative, draw conclusions about his background, and observe how unfolding events change his perceptions, not only about present actions, but of the past, as well.

Philip is, at heart, very much a southern gentleman, despite the fact that he thinks he has escaped his Nashville and Memphis heritage for New York, where he has lived for almost fifteen years, unmarried, with Holly Kaplan. Despite the painful relationship he has had with his autocratic but reserved father, now in his eighties, he responds to a series of phone calls from his unmarried sisters and returns to Memphis, where his father is planning to remarry, an eventuality which the sisters find anathema and which they are determined to countervail.

Both the immediate situation in Memphis and the history leading up to it are told in the past tense, with flashbacks to still earlier times, a rare and difficult narrative approach which keeps the reader at arm's length, but Taylor manages to give emotional power to unfolding events, in part, because Philip's narrative restraint contrasts so sharply with the meanness and manipulation of his "well-meaning" father and, now, his sisters. The irony grows as the reader sees parallels between the present circumstances of the father, his fiancée, and the sisters, and events which happened many years ago. The tables have been turned, but Philip exhibits no sense of victory, no gloating, only growing self-awareness and understanding. He remains a southern gentleman to the very end in this most unusual and enlightening novel. Mary Whipple