All I Know

The Death of Creativity

Book Review:

The Death of Santini

Pat Conroy

If you don’t hang on each word emitted by Pat Conroy, there are couple of important things to know:

1) The Great Santini (the Dad)  died about 15 years ago.

2) Pat Conroy and his Dad got to be friends later in life.

3) That family is monster bad screwed up.

That pretty much sums it up if you want to keep your money.

 

He says he has endured a lot of slings and arrows about the fact that the only thing he has ever written is his autobiography, over and over again.  So here I guess is another installment.  The subtitle is “The Story of a Father and his Son”, which isn’t true.  So between the curious sub-title, the fact described above in 1), and the fact that this is a second autobiography (the ‘fiction’ notwithstanding), I surmise that this effort can be characterized as “One for the Money.”

The subject (well beyond the theme) of the book is mental health; Conroy (Pat, I mean) is forever vacillating between self-congratulatory pride and the dark anguish of self-doubt.  It was tiring to endure in print; I’m sure he is exhausted from having to live it.  And as for that, I would like to have heard more about the several breakdowns he mentions and the roles they played in his various marriages.  What we get instead is waaay too much about much about Stanny (grandma) and the Ozark Mountain kin, and waaay too much blow-by-blow on the death of both parents.

The antics of the other nut-case siblings would be entertaining if it wasn’t so sad.

All that said, I might like to go back and take a swing at couple of his earlier novels, notably The Great Santini.

Any of you who know all about books can enlighten me as to why, in the front matter where the various subjects are denoted, the subjects are all marked ‘Fiction’.  (P.S.  I think the cover art is pitiful too.)

 

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