Beach Music

Jack McCall, a South Carolina born food and travel writer, has been living in Rome since 1980, raising his young daughter Leah alone after his wife Shyla's suicide, a leap from a Charleston bridge he has never stopped replaying. Summoned home when his mother Lucy is dying of leukemia, Jack reluctantly returns to the Carolina lowcountry, where a group of childhood friends' own buried histories start surfacing alongside his own. Shyla's father, Jack learns only now in full, survived a Nazi concentration camp, and Shyla had tattooed her father's camp number onto her own arm before her death, carrying an inherited grief Jack, absorbed in his, had never fully seen. A second thread follows Jordan Elliott, presumed dead for eighteen years after a Vietnam War protest bombing that killed two people; Jordan has actually been living in hiding as a Catholic priest, betrayed to the authorities by their mutual friend Capers Middleton, now running for governor of South Carolina on the strength of a betrayal he has never admitted to. Conroy resolves the long braid of secrets with Jordan's identity finally exposed and Jack, having spent the book learning that nearly everyone around him carries grief to match his own, marrying his old friend Ledare Ansley back in Rome, the wedding closing the novel on reconciliation rather than on any of its several unsolved griefs.

The novel is sprawling and digressive across more than six hundred pages, moving between Rome, Vietnam, wartime Europe and the Carolina coast with more subplots than a reader can hold in mind without returning often to the family tree; Conroy's prose runs consistently toward the ornate.