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. Sell to those who want to know what life in Soviet Russia is like - to those who still believe in the rights of the individual to how out his own pattern.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. The author is a Russian the novel, extraordinarily enough, is written in limpid and vital English. At its close, one feels a keener appreciation and understanding of what it means than a dozen leteers, waving the red flag, or trampling it in the dust, could give us.

It draws no aura from the unreality of its setting - to our limited 'bourgeois' experience - but the day by day round of life under the Soviet regime is simply handled as an objective fact, there to be met - or the reverse as the case may be.

And I found it first rate - in its own right, without label or stigma. Is it fair to say that this is a novel of Soviet Russia that those who generally dislike novels of Soviet Russia will like? I confess, I approached it with the suspicion resulting from an overdose of 'another rebirth of the Russian classics' school of literature.

We the living novel