The American novel is dying, and Conroy’s South of Broad enacts its agony. Conroy is one of those Southern writers who know how to write magnificently. The problem, however, is that there doesn’t seem to be anything for American writers – even those as gifted as Conroy – to write about.
Conroy’s characters (just like Franzen’s, Roth’s, or anybody else’s in American letters) are dying of boredom amidst the wealth they inhabit. All that Conroy can do to lend some interest to their sated lives is visit all kinds of sexual abuses on them. As a result, the novel reads as a list of sexual perversions that are rattled off in a perfunctory and often mechanical manner. The writer tries too hard to awaken the jaded sensibilities of his readers with tales of sexual outrage, and in the end the sheer number of sexual violations in the novel makes them mundane and boring.
This is not a bad book. I quite enjoyed reading it. I’m very glad, however, that I don’t specialize in contemporary American novel. I don’t want to be like one of those people who used to be told, “You specialize in Soviet satire? Wow, it must be fascinating to study something that doesn’t exist.”
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