![]() ![]() Yunxian’s life is constrained by rules governing her class and gender, and she is literally never alone-even when she sleeps, her maid sleeps at the foot of her bed. She doesn’t escape all of those things, but after the early death of her mother, she’s raised by her paternal grandparents, who are both doctors, and given an unusually advanced education, including in the healing arts they practice. That accident of birth should have written her fate: limited education, bound feet, arranged marriage, childbirth, and a life spent entirely behind the walls of family compounds. See creates a rich story about a girl born into an aristocratic family. Tan Yunxian was a real historical figure who published a book about her career as a physician, but little is known about her personal life. The lives of women in 15th-century China are illuminated in this engrossing novel. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. 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. Those whose musical tastes end in the early 1970s-and literary tastes are up to the minute-will especially enjoy Mitchell’s yarn.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. Bone spurs and all, it’s realistic indeed and just the thing for pop music fans of a bygone era that’s still very much with us. There’s even a highly learned if tossed-aside reference to how the Stones’ album Let It Bleed earned its name. ![]() ![]() Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Syd Barrett, Jackson Browne, and Jerry Garcia turn up (as does, decades later, the brilliant band Talk Talk, acknowledging a debt to the Utopians). Subterranean.” The usual stuff of rock dramas-the ego clashes, the drugs, the hangers-on, and record-company parasites-is all there, but Mitchell, who wasn’t born when Utopia Avenue’s putative first album was released, knows exactly which real-life musicians to seed into the story: There’s Gene Clark of The Byrds, for example, who admires a guitar figure of Jasper’s (“So that’s an F major seventh?…I call it ‘F Demented’ ”). Mostly, though, we’re on realistic ground not seen since Black Swan Green (2006), and Mitchell digs deep in his saga of how two top-of-their-form players-de Zoet and ill-fated bassist Dean Moss-recruit an unlikely keyboardist and singer in the form of an ethereal folkie named Elf Holloway, who goes electric and joins them in a band that Jasper deems “Pavonine….Magpie-minded. Oh, there are a couple of winking references to Cloud Atlas (2004), which here takes the form of “overlapping solos for piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin,” and ace rock ’n’ roll guitarist Jasper de Zoet is eventually revealed to descend from the eponymous hero of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010). There’s no time-hopping, apart from a brief epilogue set in the present, or elegant experiments in genre-busting in Mitchell’s latest novel, his first since Slade House (2015). Noted novelist Mitchell returns with a gritty, richly detailed fable from rock’s golden age. ![]()
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