One of the most celebrated novels of its time, the Pulitzer Prize winner A Summons to Memphis introduces the Carver family, natives of Nashv...
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Feb 11, 2008
Robert
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1986 must have been a singularly awful year for literature, because the book that won the Pulitzer that year would have struggled during the years when Taylor (most of whose work was released during the forties) was in his salad days.
This is not to say A Summons to Memphis, Taylor's first novel in forty years, is a bad book. It's a decent book, a nice book. And that's exactly why it doesn't deserve one of the highest honors that can be conferred on a novel. It's nice. What's so great a More...
This is not to say A Summons to Memphis, Taylor's first novel in forty years, is a bad book. It's a decent book, a nice book. And that's exactly why it doesn't deserve one of the highest honors that can be conferred on a novel. It's nice. What's so great a More...
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Nov 29, 2011
Mike
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Better known for his short stories, Peter Taylor pulled out all the stops with "A Summons to Memphis," winning the National Book Critics Award in 1986 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1987. Taylor, born in 1917, to a wealthy Nashville family, obviously wrote what he knew.
George Carver is a well known Nashville Lawyer. However, his origins are of a more humble nature. Carver's roots were in Thorne County, outside Memphis, a member of the planter class, whose wealth was More...
George Carver is a well known Nashville Lawyer. However, his origins are of a more humble nature. Carver's roots were in Thorne County, outside Memphis, a member of the planter class, whose wealth was More...
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Jul 26, 2007
Anne
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In general, I am a big fan of Southern Literature. I think the history of the South lends itself to stories about families and secrets and the struggle between doing what's right/for yourself and doing what is expected of you by others - all themes which I find quite interesting. A Summons To Memphis is told from the perspective of Philip, the younger brother of two meddling sisters. The book opens with their plea for his to return home from New York to help prevent their aging widower father fr
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Aug 29, 2008
Kevin
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“Both my sisters always had a good deal to say about the appropriateness and inappropriateness of other people’s dress. This may seem strange in the light of how it was they usually dressed themselves. But somehow one felt that their own attire could not and was not intended to be taken straight. Rather, their own attire seemed offered as a criticism of how those about them dressed. Or so I understood it. It seemed a kind of cruel joke between themselves and the beholder if the beholder underst
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Mar 20, 2009
Tim
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I love Peter Taylor's short stories, the small details and human insights, the self-deluded narrators and characters. I liked this slow moving, repetitive novel that recounts a family's broken relationships through the vantage of the youngest son, now almost fifty. In the narrator's youth, the father moved the family to Memphis after a business partner's corruption became known in Nashville. The move disrupts the family and the father proceeds to destroy the potential marriages of his two dau
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Jul 08, 2010
http://bookcents.blogspot.com/2010/07/su...
Taylor’s prose ambles along, providing rich detail to invoke an early to mid-20th-century portrait of the South. While it is easy to scoff at the premise that the family’s move could have such an impact on the members, I think Taylor means it as an allegory for Southern difficulty moving from past to present. Even if that’s the case, it feels rather clumsy and contrived even though it occasionally provides insight into some of the problems th More...
Taylor’s prose ambles along, providing rich detail to invoke an early to mid-20th-century portrait of the South. While it is easy to scoff at the premise that the family’s move could have such an impact on the members, I think Taylor means it as an allegory for Southern difficulty moving from past to present. Even if that’s the case, it feels rather clumsy and contrived even though it occasionally provides insight into some of the problems th More...
Aug 08, 2009
Consuela
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This novella won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and I suppose this might have started me off with very high expectations for it. In general I love southern books, having been reared by a southern grandmother. This book is like watching the ice melt in a tall glass of iced tea (a southern staple). It happens very slowly. As I've read in other reviews, this book does not have a lot of action. It's really about one event: the upheaval of a Nashville family forced to move to Memphis because of the betr
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Apr 26, 2011
Longfellow
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Reasons to be interested: Pulitzer Prize winner (1987), southern fiction, Memphis/Nashville, family relationships (father/son/siblings), memories of friendships/squelched romance. Also, in a lifetime of writing, this is only Taylor's second novel, published at the age of 70.
I suspect on a scale of literary perfection Taylor's novel would easily rank above average for its use of various devices and techniques of the fiction-writing craft. Because I remain a mostly for-pleasure reader, t More...
I suspect on a scale of literary perfection Taylor's novel would easily rank above average for its use of various devices and techniques of the fiction-writing craft. Because I remain a mostly for-pleasure reader, t More...
Jan 10, 2010
Diana
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A subtle, funny, touching story about a Southern family and the ways that the father's decisions and character have life-long effects on his children, and the absurd and sad ways that those children try and seek their genteel revenge.
The protagonist is a middle-aged man from Nashville by way of Memphis, an uprooting from one Tennessee city to another that Taylor leads us to believe is the turning point in the man's life. He now lives in New York, co-habitating in a 10th floor apartm More...
The protagonist is a middle-aged man from Nashville by way of Memphis, an uprooting from one Tennessee city to another that Taylor leads us to believe is the turning point in the man's life. He now lives in New York, co-habitating in a 10th floor apartm More...
Aug 28, 2010
Agnes
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I really liked this book. The main character (I don't have the book right here and I'm too lazy to look it up) grew up in Nashville and moved with his family to Memphis when he was in his early teens. The story takes place when he's in his 40s, living in New York. Both of his sisters and his father still lived in Memphis and were products of the social structure there. He was above it, and found the whole thing to be quite ridiculous.
Upon his mother's death, he received several phone More...
Upon his mother's death, he received several phone More...
Dec 16, 2008
Bill
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A brief, leisurely novel written by a master of the short story, "A Summons to Memphis" is an excellent example of what Henry James referred to as "the beautiful and blessed nouvelle." The narrator Phillip, a New York City book editor, is the son of imposing Memphis lawyer George Carver. Phillip returns home when the family is disrupted by his octogenarian father's desire to remarry, and his older sisters' determination to thwart him. Phillip, meanwhile, is still obsessed w
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Nov 21, 2010
Allielyrica
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I generally like all books, and this is not an exception. I had to read it for a research paper, and I was pleasantly surprised that I it was not as miserable at it could have been. Although Taylor's story-weaving style can become a bit monotonous at times, it does move at a steady pace. And for those diligent enough to make it through all the dysfunctional family drama, there is a somewhat pleasant ending and a little bit of a surprise too. It you're looking for a quick read, this is not it. Bu
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Jul 21, 2010
Melisa
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I read this book as part of my goal to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winning books. It was a pretty good book, but I didn't see it as a prize-winning work. I liked the "portrait" quality of the novel - the author spent a lot of time deconstructing each scene in a similar style as Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" or Truman Capote's "Breakfast At Tiffany's" (although not as gripping a deconstruction as either of these). The ending was a bit awkward...I found mysel
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Jan 24, 2012
Mr. Kovach
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I liked this book. It is about a boy who grows up in Nashville, and then moves to Tennessee when his Dad is bilked by an unscrupulous business owner. This move to Memphis, it turns out, has a tremendously negative affect on everyone in this family. I liked reading about "the way it was" in Tennessee in the 1940s through the 1990s, the way southern people (in some ways!) live differently than northerners. I respect all cultures because I find them so interesting, and even in our country
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Sep 08, 2011
Christopher
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By no means a perfect book, Peter Taylor's 'A Summons to Memphis' is still a good one -- intelligent, easy to read, quick to breeze through, and overall a good - if repetitive - story.
Phillip Carver gets phone calls from his two sisters asking him to fly to Memphis from his home in Manhattan to help stop their elderly father from marrying a younger woman. This causes Phillip to be sent head-first into memories from the past that he have haunted him all his life, and to re-examine how he feels ab More...
Phillip Carver gets phone calls from his two sisters asking him to fly to Memphis from his home in Manhattan to help stop their elderly father from marrying a younger woman. This causes Phillip to be sent head-first into memories from the past that he have haunted him all his life, and to re-examine how he feels ab More...
Aug 02, 2009
Laura
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Taylor's novel reminded me of The Optimist's Daughter. I wasn't floored by that novel either, but at least the protagonist's emotional outbursts at the end of that novel gave me some sort of emotional connection to the plot; Taylor's did not. Indeed, his controlled and clinical account of his dealings with his sisters' and father I think dearly hurt the novel. Any one dealing with the slow deterioration of a family member, and watching their siblings manipulate that elderly person, would be at
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Aug 19, 2010
Luckngrace
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This book made me feel very uncomfortable as it brought up feelings of my own family's emotional disasters and dysfunctions. You couldn't pay me to read it again, but it is a book designed to make one think and think and think and that's what won the Pulitzer Prize. I did very much enjoy the rating comments of other readers who don't know my family, myself or my insecurities. I found their viewpoints mesmerizing and insightful. Like the narrator, I can never really go home again, but unlike him
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May 04, 2011
Lena
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This book was very interesting to me. I enjoyed the historical perspective on Memphis and Nashville. The plot and characters were only secondary IMO. The book was really about Memphis and Nashville. As characters, those two cities shone more than any of the people in the book. I felt sorry for the two sisters, but I couldn't find any sympathy for the father or the main character. He was creepy, stuffy, and dull. The sisters were colorful and well-done, however. The mother wasn't developed well e
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Jun 30, 2010
Matt
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At the surface level, "A Summons to Memphis" is a simple story of a son who struggles to make sense of, recover from, or redeem his past relationships ... with a father, siblings, lover, friend and city. Below the surface, there are many thought-provoking themes about forgiving and forgetting that are continually thrown at the reader. These themes are constant and interesting without being trite. The reader works through the past, present, and future side by side with the main characte
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Jun 20, 2009
Istop4books
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This one was not at all what I thought it would be. Pulitzer prize winner, Peter Taylor tells the story (I thought at one point it might be autobiographical, and it might, but the author married and lived in several places, unlike the main character) of Phillip Carver, a book collector who lives in Manhattan, who is summoned to his father's home in Memphis, when his 2 spinster sisters realize the old man is going to remarry and they, in turn, could lose the family fortune to some fluzey. As he
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Mar 30, 2008
Owen
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Recommended from the Barthelme syllabus, A Summons to Memphis is an excellent book mostly about life in the early- to mid-20th century South. Reviewers who automatically equate Taylor with Faulkner have likely read neither. The main character's father, a recent widower, is considering remarriage. This man's daughters, fearing the loss of their inheritance, ask the main character to come back from Manhattan to convince his father against remarriage. Much time is spent remembering the family's d
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Nov 21, 2007
Anna
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Philip Carver is living a quiet life in New York. But one day he receives phone calls from both unmarried sisters living in Memphis asking him to come home. Apparently his 81-year-old father has plans to marry again and the sisters want help in thwarting those plans. Philip agrees to come and as he is preparing for the trip he finds himself being sucked back into memories of his childhood when his father was an absolute patriarch and his family was forced to do his bidding.
I thought More...
I thought More...
Jan 14, 2009
Simona
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This book started out interestingly enough with the introduction of characters who only got deeper and deeper as the story went on. The southern setting was wonderful and lends completely to the formation of said characters. The problem was, I ended up not caring what happened to any of them. I was borrrrrred beyond belief the last 1/2 of the book. I cannot believe this book won the Pulitzer. I mean, it's a "nice" book, but "nice" is not prize-worthy.
May 20, 2011
Molly
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I seriously can't believe this won a Pulitzer Prize. It's a coming of age story of a forty-something unmarried man whose father prevented all his children from marrying. I find middle-aged adolescents frustrating in general, and this one especially because the book is chock full of them. Also, it's called "A Summons to Memphis," and he doesn't actually GET to Memphis until maybe 2/3 of the way through. It's a lot of ruminations, like you'd find in an teenage emo boy's diary. Again
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Jul 09, 2008
Leah
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For a short novel, this took me quite a long time to read, and I think the only reason I continued was to find out why it won the Pulitzer. I can see that the characters are well-developed, but I opposed the way Taylor developed them. It seemed that 90 percent of the book was exposition, building characters that still seemed a bit typecast for Southern spinsters (the two sisters). The only character I really had interest in was the father, for even the narrator was bland, perhaps the one who
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Aug 06, 2010
Elizabeth
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As a New Orleanian by upbringing and a Nashvillian for the past ten years, this book added to my belief that Memphis is culturally more like New Orleans than Nashville. The novel rests, it seems, on what literary types call the "unreliable narrator." The man telling the story of his father and his sisters does so through second-hand information that he never seems to understand himself.
Nov 18, 2011
Shelley
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I was fascinated by this book being a Tennessee girl. I would love to talk to someone not from TN and see what drew them to this book. Taylor won a Pulitzer prize for this and I am not sure why. It is a good book, with interesting family issue and a few superb descriptions but I would be hard pressed to vote it in for a Pulitzer prize. Not that anyone has asked me to weigh in on that.
May 12, 2009
Andrea
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I enjoyed thinking about the structure of the story and the way it was told/written, almost as much as the story itself. The way the story unfolds and flips through time, contrasting the story of the narrator as well as that of his family was pleasant to unravel as a writer. I also liked thinking about how my feelings about the characters changed, how Taylor made that happen.
Sep 29, 2011
Denali
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It's been a long time since I read a last sentence that made me smile as much as this one did (note: on its own its not anything special, but at the tail end of everything that happens its magnificent).
This was a lovely meander through the general and specific of how we carry our memories, build our identities, and gleefully engage in the business of family trauma.
This was the first Goodreads recommendation I read and so far the new system seems to be working well.
This was a lovely meander through the general and specific of how we carry our memories, build our identities, and gleefully engage in the business of family trauma.
This was the first Goodreads recommendation I read and so far the new system seems to be working well.
May 07, 2009
Vicki
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Excellent writing. Good storyline. Tenn. author writes more than a story. Taylor presents the plot through the characters' emotions, culture of the South and its issues. Told through the son of a lawyer and his realtionship to his sisters and their relationship to their father/his pending marriage at an old age. Very good.
