Another exuberant novel from a Southern master

SOUTH OF BROAD. By Pat Conroy. Doubleday. 512 pages. $29.95.

It's been 14 years since we had a new novel from Pat Conroy, the author of such best-sellers as The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. Conroy has packed so much into his latest book that the thought crosses my mind that he could have used about half this material, emotion, energy and lavish prose to give us a novel, say, seven years ago. The other half would have more than sufficed this time around.

Don't get me wrong. Like all of Conroy's novels, South of Broad is a great story. I raced through it. I mourned when I reached the end. The narrator, Leopold Bloom King, aka Toad, and the unlikely group of friends with whom he formed lifelong bonds in high school, became so real to me that I half expected to see them in the coffee shop or down the street.

But just as this new novel has all the elements that make me love Conroy's other books, so does it share all the flaws that make me long for the long-lost days when editors used to rein in -- ever so carefully -- their over-exuberant authors.

The setting is a familiar one to Conroy fans: Charleston, S.C., a lush Southern city that's home to the genteel aristocrats who live south of Broad Street and to The Citadel, that harsh military college depicted in Conroy's 1980 novel, The Lords of Discipline. It's obvious that the book, though bursting with plenty of action, passion and intrigue among humans, is also Conroy's tribute to a city he loves. Charleston is, he tells us on the first page:

… a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. … The city's two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula.

I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks or hear the bells of St. Michael's calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees …"

You get the idea. And that's just Page One.

Back to the story: On a summer day in 1969, just before his senior year of high school, Leo King meets the people who will shape the rest of his life.

He meets them because of the circumstances and events that had shaped his life to that point: When he was a child, he found the body of his beloved older brother, Steve, floating in the bathtub where he had slit his throat and wrists with their father's razor. Since then, Leo has been in and out of mental hospitals, juvenile courts and therapists' offices as he tried to come to grips with what was left of his life. Because of his problems, he must attend the public school where his stern mother is the principal, rather than the Catholic school that he and his family would prefer.

That day, he meets an exotic set of twins -- boy and girl -- with an alcoholic mother and a troubled past; another brother and sister who are runaways from foster care; the son of the black coach of the newly integrated football team; and a boy and girl from Charleston's upper crust. With a few additions, this group forms a bond that holds even as they move through adult life, with all its challenges. We see marriages, betrayals, flirtations, good fortune and bad. Eventually, those at the heart of the group band together in the late 1980s to track down one of their number who has disappeared amid the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.

The book takes us back and forth through time, revealing bit by bit the complicated lives and interactions of all the friends. Of course, in the fiction of Pay Conroy, that's not nearly enough. We also have a killer hurricane; a lurking, mysterious man; dark secrets; and evil and depravity in a variety of forms. All is told, of course, and told again, in poetic, sometimes bombastic prose. Conroy spends much time telling us what Leo is thinking and doing and hinting broadly at dire things to come. It's almost as if he doubts his own gifts as a writer, as if he thinks he must tell us because he won't be good enough simply to show us.

But that's probably not what's going on. More likely, Conroy is so in love with Charleston, so in love with his story and so in love with words that he bubbles over with enthusiasm. He spills out a story as big as his heart and his imagination.

South of Broad is a good book, well worth reading. With a bit more restraint, it might have been a great one.