A Summons to Memphis

A Summons to Memphis

3.58 of 5 stars 3.58  ·  rating details  ·  1,910 ratings  ·  157 reviews
One of the most celebrated novels of its time, the Pulitzer Prize winner A Summons to Memphis introduces the Carver family, natives of Nashville, residents, with the exception of Phillip, of Memphis, Tennessee.

During the twilight of a Sunday afternoon in March, New York book editor Phillip Carver receives an urgent phone call from each of his older, unmarried sisters. They...more
Paperback, 224 pages
Published June 29th 1999 by Vintage (first published June 29th 1986)
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Bill  Kerwin

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 with the belief that hi...more
Robert Beveridge
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 about nice?...more
Mike
Nov 29, 2011 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars
Recommended to Mike by: The Modern Library: The Best 200 Novels Written in English Since 1950
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 based on slavery, cott...more
Anne
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...more
Kevin
“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 understo...more
Tim
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 daught...more
Mac
On subject matter alone, A Summons to Memphis spoke to me. The complexity of family relationships, specifically conflicts between parent and child...the need for forgiving and forgetting in those relationships...the role of memory in characterizing the relationships...are all issues that are often on my mind. A central event in the story--being well settled during childhood in one town and then moving to another (lesser) town--also stimulated my insights and reminiscences because I had my own si...more
Book Concierge
3.5***

Philip Carver has escaped his controlling father and now lives in New York with his much younger Jewish girlfriend. But when he gets a surprise phone call from his older sister, followed only minutes later by a call from his second sister, and then from an old family friend, he knows he has been summoned to Memphis to help deal with the “disaster.” A mere two years after his mother’s death, his 80-something father has plans to remarry and his adult children have no intention of letting him...more
Dwight
Jul 08, 2010 Dwight added it
http://bookcents.blogspot.com/2010/07...

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 that needed to b...more
Consuela
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 betra...more
Longfellow
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, this remain...more
J. Travis Moger
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor is a story about a relatively well-off Southern family whose fortunes take a turn for the worse because of the father's corrupt business partner. They move from Nashville to Memphis to start over and distance themselves from the culprit and their painful experience. That move haunts the family, and the father's need to control the lives of his children even into adulthood is repaid in kind. I listened to the book on tape, which was a little disappointing sin...more
Beth
This is a beautifully crafted book. Phillip Carver is summonned back to Memphis by his sisters after their father becomes romantically involved with a new partner following the death of their mother. From this premise unfolds a complex tale of Memphis culture and family politics. The family had moved in the children's teen years from Nashville, in the Upper South, to Memphis, in the Deep South in the years just before WWII. The move leaves scars on each of the family members, except perhaps fath...more
Pam
Feb 23, 2012 Pam rated it 4 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: Fans of Southern Literature
Recommended to Pam by: College English Teacher
A college teacher recommended this book to me over 20 years ago but I just got around to reading it and I'm glad I did. To begin with I thoroughly enjoyed his sentence construction and very good grammer. In that respect it was a pleasure to read.
I will have to admit that for awhile the story seemed a little tedious to me because it took him so long to tell us something and then he would repeat it more than once but in a little different context. At first I thought that this book was just a shor...more
Diana
Jan 10, 2010 Diana rated it 4 of 5 stars
Recommended to Diana by: Lillie
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 apartment on 82nd...more
Rick
Peter Taylor’s “A Summons to Memphis” is a delightful chronicle of a Tennessee family in transition, one moving during the 1930s from older more landed and Victorian Nashville to newer more edgy and cosmopolitan Memphis. The former had more in common with the colonial style of Richmond Virginia while the latter was distinctly shaped by the plantation soul of the Mississippi delta. Involving a family of six – including four children … two each – the tale paints the transformation in each family m...more
Susan Gibb
I can see where some of today's readers may feel that this book is boring, lacking real page-turning excitement, and perhaps even call it a navel-gazer. It is, despite the potential for a collision course set by the narrator in the first couple pages, indeed a subtle character analysis. And, while the book is spent in background information that is meant to build up to the present scenario and give it its impact, the information is mainly the narrator's opinions on his family interaction and how...more
Sidna  Bookout
It is always interesting to read what other people say about a book that I thought was dreadful. Since I have lived in Memphis for the last six years, I enjoy reading books where the city is one of the characters. However, this book seems to be more about Nashville than Memphis. Most of the references to Memphis and Memphians are negative.

The main character, Phillip Carver, is about the most self-absorbed person you can imagine. His father was a controlling jerk who kept both of Phillip's older...more
Maddy
This book was incredibly tedious. It was like Holden Caulfield and Charles Dickens had a horrible ugly child. Not only is the style repetitive to the point of frustration, but the narrator is a total pile of crap. He is selfish and completely unaware of anyone else in his life having feelings or desires. He assumes that all the men who accompany his sisters are paid escorts, because who could possibly find middle-aged women attractive. He believes that his sweetheart allowed herself to be sent t...more
Agnes Mack
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 calls from...more
Carolyn
This isn't your usual book in that there isn't a clear plot and resolution. The author Peter Taylor is a short story writer and this short novel feels just like that, a snap shot of a time in the Manning family. But that's what made this book so great, each chapter was a short story with its own plot.

Two cities in Tennessee: Memphis and Nashville were life-changing for the Manning family. It is a satirical look at how people in the 1950s viewed these cities and this time period. When the Manning...more
Kaye Hallows
This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and is hailed as a "classic work of American literature" but I had a hard time with the repetition of a handful of events that weren't all that interesting and didn't improve with the multiple tellings. Yes, the narrator does finally gain some insight into his seriously dysfunctional family, as a mature man in his late fifties, but this knowledge seems to arrive too late for him to be able to do anything useful with it, beyond having a few more meaningful...more
Allie Martin
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...more
Melisa
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 myself wondering if the story of comin...more
Megan
Some people can never move on or move past the traumatic or dramatic events in their lives. Those events trap them and define them. The narrator, Phillip Carver, and his older sisters, Betsy and Josephine, are prisoners of their collective past, shared with their selfish and domineering father, George. The children are middle-aged, live seemingly "normal" lives, and are successful at their careers (the sisters, together, own a real estate business, and Phillip works in publishing while also trad...more
Mr. Kovach
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 we have p...more
Christopher MacMillan
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
Sharon
What a delightful surprise. I found this in a used book store in Fairhope, Alabama, and was curious. What a terrific writer Mr. Taylor is, and how I enjoyed reading about the schism between Nashville & Memphis, which I had thought I sensed when I lived in Nashville for nearly a decade in the 90's. I confess that I often wonder if people from places other than the deep South think that all Southern writers are liars and embellishers. Not so, at least in Peter Taylor's case, I think. Once agai...more
Laura
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...more
Luckngrace
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...more
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Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor was a U.S. author and writer. Considered to be one of the finest American short story writers, Taylor's fictional milieu is the urban South. His characters, usually middle or upper class people, often are living in a time of change and struggle to discover and define their roles in society.
Peter Taylor also wrote three novels, including A Summons to Memphis in 1986, f...more
More about Peter Taylor...
The Old Forest and Other Stories The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor In the Tennessee Country: A Novel A Woman of Means: A Novel In the Miro District and Other Stories

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