My Reading Life

I've not read Pat Conroy's fiction — his basketball memoir My Losing Season was enjoyable — and after this accounting of his prose style and literary heroes, I probably won't be rushing off to read the doorstop-sized Beach Music or others of his novels. But give Conroy this: He knows his books can be too lush, too filled with advectives and adverbs, too overheated, and he simply doesn't care. A child weaned on Gone with the Wind and Thomas Wolfe was never going to be the next Hemingway. Conroy tosses around metaphors like they are gold doubloons, when at best they are those coin-shaped chocolates wrapped in golden tinfoil.