In the great Southern tradition of storytelling, the city of Charleston, S.C., is the principal “character’’ in Pat Conroy’s new novel, “South of Broad.’’ Like the Southern Gothic masters, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Conroy understands that a compelling sense of place will lend grace to his narrative, inhabiting the minds of his readers like the mournful strains of an old folk song. For Faulkner, it was the mythical Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, and for O’Connor, the mean little towns and desolate rural stretches of Georgia. Conroy’s Charleston is “the kingdom of snake handlers and clay eaters and moonshiners, where the farmland itself was stringy, stone-pocked, and unforgiving.’’
Back to the garden
Conroy gracefully captures his beloved South, but his characters are a bit rusty
The South of American literature is a humid, overgrown, degenerative profusion - the Garden after the fall. In Conroy’s work, like his contemporaries Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown, the garden contains an antebellum mansion, shiny and white on the outside, but destroyed by creeping vines and dry rot from within. It’s the amortization of America’s original sin - slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow - a mortgage that will never be repaid.
At the center of Conroy’s tale is 18-year-old Leopold Bloom King. Leo, named for the hero in James Joyce’s “Ulysses,’’ is struggling with the suicide of his beloved older brother, Steve, who has been dead for several years. Leo has spent that time “among drugs and needles and psychological testing and shrinks and therapists and priests,’’ coming to terms with his grief. He is buoyed, however, by his ardent Roman Catholic faith and his early morning routine, delivering the News and Courier. “The smell of smoke from the chimney of our house was stronger than either the rivers or the marshes and made the airwaves above the neighborhood as dark-scented and fragrant as a night garden.’’
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