I recently read Pat Conroy's new novel, South of Broad, because it was so enthusiastically pitched at last summer's American Library Association conference. I really like those Random House marketing folks, but I despised this book.A diverse group of characters meet as high school students in Charleston in the 1960s. The characters couldn't be more different from each other: they are white, black, Catholics, Episcopalians, Charleston socialites, poor Appalachians, and orphans. And, of course, there is a beloved gay character.
Although the characters treat each other abominably much of the time, they bond, despite their differences. Their friendship endures over the course of two decades, weathering unrequited love, affairs, marriages, breakdowns, illness, a psychopathic killer, and Hurricane Hugo.
Out of the many unbelievable occurrences in this book, the most preposterous, for me, was the characters' rescue of the beloved gay character in San Francisco in 1989. Having lost track of their friend, and fearing that he is dying of AIDS in the city, the Charlestonians go to San Francisco to find him. Like a band of Southern superheroes, they begin delivering meals to AIDS sufferers in an attempt to find their friend. They even enlist the help of the real-life columnist Herb Caen, who reports on their quest in his column.
And my patience ran out. Like every other resident of the city in the '80s, I read Herb Caen's column in the newspaper every day. Somehow, using him as a character in this story just irritated me, because it didn't ring true. Did the keepers of his estate agree to this?
Overwrought and overwritten, South of Broad is one big, sloppy soap opera, and should have, at least, stayed in the South.
