Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy. Paperback.

Abundant, complicated, resonant.

I had a love/hate relationship with protagonist Tom Wingo throughout Conroy’s best-selling novel. Wingo is self-indulgent, self-loathing, and self-destructive in the most textbook ways. He torpedoes his marriage, emotionally (and for much of the book, physically) abandons his children, all while clinging to an incredibly disturbing past.

And yet. I couldn’t abandon this book, couldn’t tear my eyes from the painful, pitiful, unbelievable stories unfolding before them. I nearly loathed the narrative itself, but the writing was so powerful and affecting that I couldn’t put it down. I can’t stroll past the buildings lining Central Park West without picturing Wingo dangling Herbert Woodruff’s prized violin over the railing of a penthouse balcony. On a crisp fall afternoon, I can almost see Wingo and Bernard Lowenstein tossing a football between them. And I will forever be haunted by the most horrific, violent rape scene (complete with an intervening pet tiger) that I’ve ever read. Years after reading this novel, with its themes and scenes still vivid in my mind, I’ve tried but failed to deny the mastery of Conroy’s writing. That readers might not love the characters and storyline was never the point. Conroy pulls from his own violent childhood to paint this incredibly moving, complicated story; and if this book doesn’t serve as a fervent reminder of the need for effective mental healthcare, I don’t know what would.

Favorite Quotation: “Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.”