The Prince of Tides in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Apr 23, 2010 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: contemporary, literary-fiction, novels, fiction, ultimate-reading-list, romance, popular-fiction, ebooks

Don't hold the film against the book. Rereading this I was reminded from the very first line why I loved it so much: My wound is geography. How can you not read on after a line like that one? And it's a fitting line, because the work does deal with two places as much as any human character: small town Colleton in lowcountry South Carolina and New York City--quintessential big city and its perfect foil.

Tom Wingo, the narrator and protagonist must travel from where he lives in South Carolina to N Don't hold the film against the book. Rereading this I was reminded from the very first line why I loved it so much: My wound is geography. How can you not read on after a line like that one? And it's a fitting line, because the work does deal with two places as much as any human character: small town Colleton in lowcountry South Carolina and New York City--quintessential big city and its perfect foil.

Tom Wingo, the narrator and protagonist must travel from where he lives in South Carolina to New York City where his sister lies in the hospital after her third suicide attempt. Their habitual greeting to each other after long separations?

"What was your family life like, Savannah?" I asked, pretending I was conducting an interview.
"Hiroshima," she whispered.
"And what has life been like since you left the warm, abiding bosom of your nurturing, close-knit family?"
"Nagasaki," she said, a bitter smile on her face.

That's fairly typical of the dialogue. Snappy, witty, with humor both hiding and expressing a lot of pain (even if sometimes a bit artificial). Tom tells Savannah's psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein, their family history--to help his sister, but to help himself too. Through a great deal of flashback, we learn of the wounds inflicted on all three Wingo children, Tom, Savannah, and the lost Luke. It doesn't ever feel static though, but suspenseful, because we're engaged in the mystery rooted in the past of what damaged all of them. The central event away from the book does seem implausible, but I didn't feel that way reading it, every bit of the book is compulsively readable. The prose is often lyrical--the descriptions of lowcountry South Carolina read like prose poems. The story always engaging, its characters unforgettable--I zipped through its 679 pages.

I've read and enjoyed other books by Conroy. I was assigned The Water Is Wide, his story about teaching poor kids in a one-room schoolhouse in high school, and The Lords of Discipline is a memorable mystery and portrait of a Southern military school modeled on The Citadel where Conroy went. I find Prince of Tides the most powerful and memorable of the Conroy books I've read though. ...more

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Sep 10, 2009 Stacy rated it it was amazing

When I moved to Los Angeles 20 years ago, I took a temp job, as one step towards working in the film industry. As it happened, I was able to meet someone on that job who was working with Barbara Streisand as they headed in pre-production on The Prince of Tides. Because of her committment to that project, she was unable to take another job, for which she interviewed me and passed me along. Just a month after moving to town, I was working on my first feature film.

All these later, in celebration of ...more

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