A Summons to Memphis
by Peter Taylor
Summary
Phillip Carver is forty nine, an editor of rare books in New York, living with a younger woman he will not marry. His two unmarried sisters summon him home to Memphis to help them stop their eighty one year old father from marrying again. He goes, reluctantly, and the trip becomes an inventory of everything the family did to itself.
The wound is a move. When Phillip was thirteen the family left Nashville for Memphis, because his father's business partner and closest friend ruined him, and a man of that time and class responded by relocating rather than by being seen. His children never recovered their footing. His daughters' engagements were broken, one at a time, by a father who found every young man unsuitable, until the sisters were middle aged, wealthy, unmarried and waiting. Phillip's own marriage was prevented in much the same way, and he left the South for good.
Now the old man, widowed and cheerful, wants to remarry, and his daughters intend to stop him, in a spirit that is unmistakably revenge dressed up as concern.
Phillip is a deeply unreliable guide to his own family. He presents himself as the detached one, flying in from New York to observe, and the reader gradually notices how thoroughly he has arranged a life designed to avoid ever being asked for anything.
Taylor writes in long, qualified, doubling back sentences, and everything reaches you through that narration rather than in scene. Nothing much happens on the page. Two old women plot, an old man goes to a party, a son sits in a plane.
It is short, around two hundred pages, and slow, and it is quietly devastating about what good manners can be used to do to people over forty years. Best for readers who like Henry James or Elizabeth Bowen, and who want a family novel where the violence is entirely conversational.
Historical Context & Significance
A Summons to Memphis won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was a finalist for the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award.
Peter Taylor was principally a short story writer, publishing in the New Yorker for decades, and this was only his second novel, arriving when he was sixty nine. He belonged to a remarkable literary generation at Kenyon College, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom and roomed with Robert Lowell alongside Randall Jarrell.
His lifelong subject was the upper middle class white South of Tennessee in the twentieth century, and specifically the migration from country town to city that reordered its families. He wrote about it in the manner of Henry James rather than of Faulkner, which is why he is admired more often than he is read.