Pat Conroy’s latest novel panned by early critics
Pat Conroy’s South of Broad receives less than rave reviews
Pat Conroy’s latest novel, South of Broad, which was released for sale yesterday, has already been panned by professional and amateur critics.
In a review titled “Prince of Bromides” (in contrast to the title of Conroy’s hit novel Prince of Tides), Newsweek magazine’s Louisa Thomas in the upcoming August 17 issue calls Conroy’s novel “melodramatic” and “overwrought”. “What’s really objectionable about the purple prose,” she says, “is that it swamps everything in a homogenizing bath of sickly beauty.”
Some early readers of the 528-page novel have been no less negative in their comments at the Amazon web site. “The dialogue seemed stilted and did not ring true”, one reader said. “The book began to seem, to me, like the plot of a soap opera as opposed to a story that I could imagine is true.”
Not all reader critics have been negative, however. “I read an advanced reader’s copy of this new Conroy novel,” one reader wrote, “and must say that it is simply beautiful from the first line.”
South of Broad is Pat Conroy’s first novel in 14 years, coming after Beach Music, which appeared in 1995 to reviews that in some cases stated Conroy had finished saying in that book everything he could say about his emotionally complicated life, details of which abound in his novels together with lyrical descriptions of lowcountry South Carolina.
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