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. They come down and Ray travels home (the transcontinental transcendentalism of On The Road here), hoofs it back from North Carolina to go up Desolation Peak, looking for the Great Truth, after the months of "cut-off-ness, snipped, blownoutness, putoutness, turned-off-ness, nothing-happens-ness, gone-ness, gone-out-ness." There, high on a hilltop, it is revealed, the search ends-and except for those dedicated, nirvana will never have seemed nearer.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. Under the influence of Japhy, Ray is also introduced to the simpler splendors of the great outdoors-the cook-out and the sleeping bag-as well as the happy abandon of "leaping and yelling from crag to crag" on a big climb. Up for air after The Subterraneans-way up (mountain climbing is the new kick) are the Dharma Bums, Ray Smith, Japhy Ryder-a high-domed hepcat-and some of their Zen Lunatic friends who have been chewing their cuds, sipping muscatel, junking, holding Zen Fun Love Orgies (no celibate Buddhists these) in the cellars of San Francisco.
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