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. Still pretty good caviar.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. Miss Mitford does however observe, turns a noticeable phrase, limns a fast character sketch, and has an eye for delicate diplomacy and social elegance - all of which could be used to better advantage. Crises of French governments falling, the issue of Les Isles Miniquiers, the erratic escapades of Fanny's younger sons which end in a mobbing of the Embassy (for a teen-age singer but which is thought to be a demonstration for Alfred) keep this on a farcical plane which lacks the bite that would make it noteworthy. Their grown sons, Basil and David, create unexpected situations, the reporter Amyas Mockbar gives them the full blacklist treatment, Fanny's young and devastating secretary Northey swims in and out of international entanglements while Fanny's flighty relations - Uncles Davey and Matthew- help to salvage almost irretrievable errors. That they follow the eccentric, glittering Sir Louis and Lady Leone starts them off on a very left foot, but, throughout a complex of ill-guided incidents and actions, they do accomplish their mission for key-noting sobriety and security. Fanny and Alfred (of Love in a Cold Climate - 1949) shake off their Oxford seclusion when Alfred is called from his chair of Pastoral Theology to become, as Sir Wincham, the British Ambassador in Paris.
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