Book: The Death of Santini by Pat Conroy

The Story of a Father and His Son

An interesting book. I still don't quite know what to make of it.

Here we have a horribly abusive father according to Pat Conroy as detailed in The Great Santini. Then this book, which in the beginning reiterates some of his traumatic childhood: "My mother's physical beauty played counterpoint to my father's powerful fists….H knocked me with another backhand that sent me sliding across the living room floor…."

But, amazingly, his father spends the rest of his life being rather proud of his role. He goes to book-signings and never once acknowledges or apologizes. He insists Pat made up the stories, was weak and sniveling, was an opportunist, wrote "horseshit." In this book, Pat and his siblings deal with their father (and their mother who finally did divorce Donald and remarry) as they age and get ill and die.

This is also a story of siblings, often with fractious relationships, attempted suicides, a completed suicide, breakdowns and different memories.

The prose is gothic and florid some of the time but then so is Pat Conroy's life and his sister Carol Ann's life, and the lives of his mother's family. His father's family was Chicago Irish Catholic and they do not fare well in this book either.

Still, there is redemption…

Don gets colon cancer.

"When my father left the hospital, we took off on the first of many road trips we made during the last two years of his life." The book is also about Pat Conroy who also has not had the most tranquil life. He is volatile, quick-tempered, perhaps self-aggrandizing and loves those southern states in which he lived much of his life….He weeps a lot as his parents get old, infirm and die, and in his eulogy for his father says: "Don Conroy was the best uncle I ever saw, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend--and my God, what a father. After my mother divorced him and The Great Santini was published, Don Conroy had the best second act I ever saw. He never was simply a father. This was the Great Santini."

"In his last weeks, my father told me, 'I was always your best subject, son. Your career took a nosedive after The Great Santini came out.' He had become so media savvy that during his last illness he told me not to schedule his funeral on the same day as the Seinfeld farewell. The colonel thought it would hold down the crowd. The colonel's death was front-page news across the country. CNN announced his passing on the evening news all around the world."