A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (Knopf, 1986)
Peter Taylor is a gentle, accomplished writer, but this book bemused and often irritated me. I think part of the problem may be that Taylor is not a natural or adroit novelist; this book is very oddly (and ineptly) paced and structured. It moves slowly, if at all, like those traveling sprinklers that never seem to be moving yet eventually traverse a lawn.
A Summons to Memphis is narrated in first person by Philip Carver, a bland middle-aged man who lives in New York City and works as a rare book dealer and editor, but we never hear much about his life's work and he expresses very little interest in or passion for books. He expresses very little interest in or passion for anything, perhaps because when he was 13 his father, due to a cataclysmic business failure caused by his partner, uprooted his family from their idyllic life in Nashville and moved them to Memphis, which had mysteriously disastrous effects on all the family members: Philip's mother lost her Nashville grace and poise and became a chronic invalid and recluse; his two sisters, Josephine and Betsy, were forced into spinsterhood when their father sabotaged both their engagements; Georgie, his brother, was killed in WWII; and Philip's own great love with a young woman named Carla Price was also brutally (and inexplicably) terminated by his father, who was the only Carver to thrive in their new life in Memphis. (Philip escaped to New York City where he now lives with a younger woman in a static, unsatisfying relationship that seems tepid at best.)
The present action of the book, such as it is, revolves around the elder Mr. Carver's attempt to marry after his wife dies and leaves him a widower in his 80s. The two sisters summon Philip to Memphis and enlist him in thwarting their father's matrimonial plans, an ugly act that seems part revenge and part safeguarding their inheritance. But this potential conflict is resolved off-page with no drama, and the book's denouement is equally bloodless and inscrutable.
All these seemingly genteel people act ruthlessly to destroy one another's happiness, but it is never clear what motivates all this bad behavior or what satisfaction, if any, it affords. So a very puzzling book -- somewhat Chekhovian in its minor-key uneventfulness, but lacking Chekhov's resonance and mysterious, beautiful, and heartbreaking, depth. The reader is barely involved, let alone moved.