The World According to Wingo the Prince of Tides

By R.Z. Sheppard

The prevailing literary wind this fall is from the Southeast. The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy's high-blown family saga of coastal South Carolina, began to stir interest in May at the American Booksellers Association convention in New Orleans. Introduced by Walter Cronkite, Conroy regaled publishing executives and retailers with funny stories about his career and family. With just the right amount of country-boy shuffle, he told how his father, a rough Marine Corps fighter pilot, and his mother, a genteel Georgia beauty, gave new meaning to the word incompatibility. Conroy reminded everyone that his father was the model for the eruptive hero of his 1976 novel The Great Santini. He then disarmed his listeners by talking frankly about the close relationship between his life and his fiction.

Writers are usually touchy about discussing this subject. But faced with an eager and influential audience, Conroy suggested a truth common to most readers: they are less interested in distinctions of fact and fiction than in rousing stories and lively characters. The Prince of Tides provides plenty of both. There is the time Grandma tried out a coffin at the local funeral home and nearly frightened Ruby Blankenship to death. There is Grandpa, who can water-ski 40 miles and carries a 90-lb. cross through town every Good Friday. Conroy can be shameless in his extravagances of language and plot, yet he consistently conveys two fundamental emotions: the attachment to place and the passion for blood ties.

Literally and figuratively, the Wingos of "Colleton, S.C.," are crazy about one another. Father Henry is a shrimper whose feelings for his family are well disguised with verbal and physical abuse. His wife Lila despises his brutality and low status and dreams of moving up in Colleton society. Eldest Son Luke, the Rambo of the salt marshes, returns from Viet Nam to wage a one- man guerrilla war against the construction of plutonium production plants. Brother Tom is an ex-high school football coach struggling with the aftermath of a nervous breakdown and a failing marriage. His twin sister Savannah is a successful poet and, fortunately, a failed suicide.

The Wingos are players in a ramshackle tragicomedy supported by a dubious narrative device. After Savannah tries to kill herself in Manhattan, Tom comes to town and spends the summer talking to his sister's psychiatrist, the beautiful and unhappily married Dr. Susan Lowenstein. He is a charming Southern storyteller who fills his 45-min. hours with lyric and grotesque tales of his low-country family life. He also plays the defensive redneck to Lowenstein's assured Jewish intellectual, a match-up that begins as a clash of stereotypes and ends as beautiful chemistry. But it is never clear who is paying the psychiatrist's $75-a-visit fee and why she is more interested in Tom's yarns than in Savannah's feelings.

The relationship does provide Conroy with opportunities for flashbacks, ominous foreshadowings and the airing of ambivalences about South Carolina and New York. Though aggressively Southern, Tom keeps his nose pressed against the windows of Manhattan sophistication. He is particularly fond of pricey restaurants where he can indulge his taste for overseasoned prose. At Lutece, for example, "I tasted the wine and it was so robust and appealing that I could feel my mouth singing with pleasure when I brought the glass from my lips. The aftertaste held like a chord on my tongue; my mouth felt like a field of flowers. The mousse made me happy to be alive." The book is loaded with this sort of gush, although it is hard to believe that Conroy does not know the difference between good and silly writing. Elsewhere, he can make one's mouth water with straightforward description: "I caught a ten-pound sea bass and stuffed it with shrimp and fresh crabmeat, then cooked it over slow coals."

Conroy is also effective when exploring the injuries of class. Small- town South Carolina is a hothouse of humiliations for a family like the Wingos. Lila's bids for membership in the Colleton League are repeatedly turned down; the boys are teased about their unfashionable clothes. All but Henry, jailed for smuggling dope on his boat, have their vindications. Lila divorces Henry and marries the town's richest citizen; Luke and Tom become high school football heroes, and Savannah writes The Shrimper's Daughter, becomes famous and moves north to live in Greenwich Village as a lesbian.

Conroy tempts fate and the limits of his talent when he plays at being William Styron, John Irving and perhaps even Mark Twain, if Dr. Lowenstein's couch is considered as a raft on which Jew and Gentile drift toward enlightenment. There is also a reckless blend of Bobbsey Twins adventure and revenge fantasies usually associated with drive-in-movie horror festivals. Would you believe that after Lila, Savannah and Tom are raped by three escaped convicts, the family's pet Bengal tiger bursts in and rips the criminals into small pieces? Would you believe that no one finds out about this because Lila insists on cleaning up the mess before Henry comes home? What you can believe is that Prince of Tides, no small amusement, will be on the best-seller lists before you can say chutzpah and grits.