Many years ago, I watched the movie adaptation of Pat Conroy’s 1986 novel, The Prince of Tides. I only recently got around to reading the book.
The 1991 movie stars Nick Nolte as Tom Wingo, a South Carolinian who finds himself a fish out of water in New York City.
Why is Tom Wingo in NYC? His famous sister, poet Savannah Wingo, has just had a psychotic episode. Savannah requires the intervention of psychiatrist Susan Lowenstein, played by Barbara Streisand.
The movie revolves around the resultant romance between Tom Wingo and Susan Lowenstein. The movie poster collage even features an image of Streisand and Nolte in a moment of what appears to be post-coital tenderness.
This was done, no doubt, so that Hollywood could bill the movie as a romantic drama, targeted at the then middle-aged Baby Boomer demographic. But this represented a vast departure from the emphasis of Pat Conroy’s long novel.
The novel does include a romantic, adulterous interlude between Wingo and Lowenstein, both of whom are trapped in unfulfilling, ill-fitting marriages. (A very middle-aged Baby Boomer theme.) But most of the novel consists of flashback stories from Wingo’s troubled, colorful childhood.
Tom Wingo, his twin sister Savannah, and his brother Luke were all scarred by their formative years in South Carolina. The 600-page novel is mostly a long series of flashback stories that drive home this point, again and again. This is all that happened to them…This is why Tom Wingo and his siblings went so very wrong…
As a result, The Prince of Tides is less a single novel than a series of loosely connected stories, which Wingo revisits in memory during his extended stay in New York City. Some of these stories are interesting, or at least have the potential to be interesting. Far too many of them, though, come across as random and far-fetched.
For example, there is a subplot in which the Wingo siblings, as adolescents, abduct an albino porpoise from a public aquarium. The elements of this side tale are so improbable as to resemble slapstick.
There is an early flashback story in which the children’s coarse, abusive father, Henry Wingo, is a downed pilot behind German lines in World War II. This story seems rushed, and almost as improbable as the subsequent white porpoise tale.
And then there are the really weird subplots involving miscarried infants and the Wingo siblings’ grandparents. I’ll leave those for the reader to explore on her own, if she decides to read the book.
The Prince of Tides would have been much better if Conroy had written it as a series of books. Or, perhaps, a series of long short stories about the same characters. But the publishing industry of the mid-1980s was focused on delivering thick, standalone novels for the shelves of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. That’s what The Prince of Tides is, in terms of its packaging. The storytelling suffers as a result.
The Prince of Tides lacks a central narrative drive. Look here! Conroy tells the reader. No—now look over here at this!
Pat Conroy’s novels tend to be hit or miss for me. I loved The Lords of Discipline (1980). I found South of Broad (2009) to be a slog. The Prince of Tides is a novel that I do not regret reading once, but not one that I am ever likely to read again.
Conroy grew up in South Carolina, the son of a harsh military father. Just like so many of his characters. All of his novels, in one way or another, tend to be autobiographical. Conroy seems to be revisiting his own troubled childhood in fiction, again and again.
Self-focused fiction can be both beautifully authentic and numbingly self-indulgent. The Prince of Tides is some of both.
-ET
View THE PRINCE OF TIDES on Amazon