Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, 'Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?' and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.

Powerfully crafted individual moments and honestly drawn emotions, but first-timer Grooms can’t quite synthesize them into a unified whole.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Then Aunt Bennie comes from Philadelphia to help her sister Clara, Josie is dragged into jail after her dog is viciously killed by a police canine, Clara dies, Carl is never reconciled to her death, and Walter ships out for Vietnam-which returns us to Bombingham’s opening scene. Grooms vividly evokes these stirring events, as well as Walter’s cruel experiences at the receiving end of police brutality the boy’s cathartic transformation during a particularly brutal assault is especially persuasive. Meanwhile, civil rights marches, boycotts, and protests gather force. Her frustrated husband Carl finds solace in area bars. It seems Clara has adopted a fatalist’s stance toward her cancer-driven, Walter suspects, by her memory of her own father’s senseless death years ago on trumped-up charges of raping a white woman.

As children, Walter and his sister Josie share as their most pressing concern the declining health of their mother Clara, who refuses to seek medical assistance. Flashing back, Grooms, an award-winning short-story writer, poet, and essayist, does a lovely job of sketching such timeless aspects of Walter’s and his friend Lamar’s boyhood as their search for specimens to examine under Lamar’s microscope, even as he nails the details of institutionalized racism in the 1960s. Composing a letter to their families turns his thoughts to his turbulent youth in Birmingham, Alabama. Walter Burke trudges toward a village in Vietnam and watches a pair of friends die in a firefight. An engaging though loosely woven debut about an African-American boy who experiences the death of his mother-and the words of Martin Luther King-in the same year.

Bombingham anthony grooms