![]() He was also a genuinely heroic figure given to surprising, if infrequent, moments of kindness. The Conroy/Meecham of the novel was a physically imposing despot who inflicted extreme and inexcusable violence on his wife and children. Brutal, commanding and charismatic, the elder Conroy was a man who legitimized such cliches as “larger than life.” As most readers know, the novel’s patriarch protagonist, Bull Meecham, was a lightly fictionalized version of Conroy’s own father, Col. The public face of that story began with the appearance of Conroy’s novel “The Great Santini” in 1976. ![]() On the evidence of his latest book, Conroy may finally have put his endless - and endlessly fascinating - story to rest. It has been his central subject, and he has pursued it with an obsessive’s attention to each recollected detail. Conroy has been writing about his family and their internecine wars for nearly 40 years. ![]() “A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.” In the case of the Conroy family - as colorful and contentious a bunch as you could hope to encounter in either literature or life - those sentiments ring true. “I don’t believe in happy families,” Pat Conroy tells us in his luminous, unsparing new memoir, “The Death of Santini.” ![]()
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