Words&Dirt

Summary:

Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides is the story of the Wingos, a family from South Carolina’s Lowcountry. The main characters are three siblings who are born at the beginning of the American postwar period: Tom and Savannah (twins), and their older brother Luke. Tom, our narrator, has spent most of his adult life ignoring the horrific details of his upbringing, but is forced to reckon with his past in order to help Savannah recover from a grim battle with mental illness. The book jumps back and forth through time as Tom recounts his childhood with the help of Dr. Susan Lowenstein, Savannah’s psychiatrist, and Tom must grapple not only with the demons of yesterday but with the question of how to live out the rest of his life. The Prince of Tides is a family epic of the highest order––a beautiful, brilliant, and brutal novel that explores the darkest depths of human depravity and failure even as it reaches heroically for reconciliation and redemption.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• This is the first of Conroy’s novels that I’ve read, so I was delighted to learn that he’s not only a great storyteller but also one hell of a writer. His prose is fantastic throughout the novel, including stunning descriptive passages, insightful observations, and witty dialogue.
• Tom Wingo is a nuanced and fascinating narrator, one whose rich inner life is tragically betrayed by the brash persona he has crafted from decades of using humor and aggression as defense mechanisms to cover up his psychic pain and feelings of personal failure and loss.
• The book contains numerous passages exploring the fraught nature and internal contradictions of modern American manhood. Tom displays an extremely high level of self-awareness and self-criticism, while at the same time continuing to enact many of the classic tropes of toxic masculinity. I feel like Conroy was really ahead of his time in terms of understanding how the intergenerational abuse of boys was polluting the waterways of American society.
• Another prescient feature is Conroy’s confrontational examination of the ideological, experiential, and geographical divides between rural and urban America. These societal fissures have widened and calcified in the decades since this book’s original publication, to the point where people are starting to worry about violent uprisings and even civil war. This book is overdue for a revival among coastal elites who have become far too comfortable writing off their fellow citizens who come from “less sophisticated” parts of the country. It is also a brilliant critique of rural America from the inside––one that celebrates what’s worth celebrating but doesn’t shy away from the many sins of small town life.
• Conroy also presents some bold takes on the nature of psychological disorders, gender differences/sexism, and racism. These are the most dated aspects of the novel and are best treated as artifacts of their time rather than lessons that resound perfectly in contemporary terms.
• Unexpectedly, I came across several passages about playing sports that mirrored my personal experience with preternatural accuracy. Conroy really gets how intense physical competition both bolsters and compromises the psychosocial development of boys.
• I tend to think that trigger warnings should be used sparingly, but this is definitely a book that should be approached cautiously, especially by people who have experienced domestic violence and/or sexual assault. It contains one of the most explicit and upsetting depictions of sexual violence I have ever read.
• In the end, this book left me wondering why Conroy isn’t more of a household name, someone on the level of John Steinbeck or Toni Morrison. Perhaps that’s the case in the south or other parts of the country, but whatever the case I hope to see his popularity increase over my lifetime. I will definitely read more of his work in the future.

Favorite Quotes:

I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being. I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try to coax him gently toward maturity. (100)

My mother taught us that it was the highest form of loyalty to cover our wounds and smile at the blood we saw in our mirrors. She taught me to hate the words family loyalty more than any two words in the language.

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float. (158)

There’s only one thing difficult about being a man, Doctor. Only one thing. They don’t teach us how to love. It’s a secret they keep from us. We spend our whole lives trying to get someone to teach us how to do it and we never find out how. The only people we can ever love are other men because we understand the loneliness engendered by this thing denied. When a woman loves us we’re overpowered by it, filled with dread, helpless and chastened before it. Why women don’t understand us is that we can never return their love in full measure. We have nothing to return. We were never granted the gift. (438)

The thresholds of my talents were modest and my desire far exceeded my abilities. I was known as a hustler, and my coaches grew fond of me over the years. When runners burst through the defensive line, I made them remember me. I tackled them with a recklessness, a willed ferocity, not proscribed by minimal talent. Only I knew that this ferocity was the handiwork of terror. I would never lose my visceral fear of the game, but it was a secret I never shared with the world. I turned that fear into an asset and it helped me define myself as I spent a four-year apprenticeship beneath its languid jurisdiction. I played afraid but did not dishonor myself. It was the fear that made me love the sport so much and love myself for turning that fear into an act of ardor, even worship. (520)

When you are dealing with Tom Wingo, it is a given that he will always find a way to cheapen and debase any virtues a confident manhood might provide. There was a spurious shine to my manhood, like the gleaming artillery of a county that surrendered without a fight. (599)

I tried to think of something to say, a summing up, but I could think of nothing. I had taught myself to listen to the black sounds of the heart and learned some things that would serve me well. I had come to this moment with my family safely around me and I prayed that they would always be safe and that I would be contented with what I had. I am southern made and southern broken, Lord, but I beseech you to let me keep what I have. Lord, I am a teacher and a coach. That is all and it is enough. But the black sounds, the black sounds, Lord. When they toll within me, I am seized with a capacity for homage and wonder. I hear them and want to put my dreams to music. When they come I can feel an angel burning in my eye like a rose, and canticles of the most meticulous praise rise out of the clear submarine depths of secret ambient ecstasy. (662)

Rating: 10/10