The Great Santini

I’d never paid any attention to Pat Conroy until a few years ago when I read one of my favorite books of all time “Gone with the Wind”. Conroy wrote the beautiful introduction to that book. My rule with classics, not that I read them as often as I probably should, is to read the introduction after completing the book. Once I finished “Gone with the Wind” and then read Conroy’s introduction, I knew that this would be an author that I would like. In that introduction, he describes his mother reading him “Gone with the Wind” from a very early age. I believe that he was five years or old so, something like that. His mother, a true Southerner, sounded so much, like the mother in “The Great Santini”. This is one of my favorite excerpts from “The Great Santini”, a letter from the mother to her son, Ben, on his birthday:“’My dear son, my dear Ben, my dear friend who becomes a man today, I want to tell you something’” the letter began. ‘You are my eldest child, the child I have known the longest, the child I have held the longest. I wanted to write you a letter about being a man and what it means to be a man in the fullest sense. I wanted to tell you that gentleness is the quality I have admired the most in men, but then I remembered how gentle you were. So I decided to write something else. I want you to always follow your noblest instincts. I want you to be a force for right and good. I want you to always defend the weak as I have taught you to do. I want you to always be brave and know that whatever you do or wherever you go, you walk with my blessings and my love. Keep your faith in God, your humility, and your sense of humor. Decide what you want from life then let nothing deter you from getting it. I have had many regrets in my life and many sadnesses but I will never regret the night you were born. I thought I knew about love and the boundaries of love until I raised you these past eighteen years. I knew nothing about love. That has been your gift to me. Happy Birthday. Mama.’”Pat Conroy has a way with storytelling, and this was a powerful read. This book is based on his own life growing up in a military family, with an abusive father. Although there were many painful and difficult scenes, the story dragged a bit in some parts. It was an amazing book, but I didn’t love it as much as others that I have read by him.A quote that liked:“Because I saw myself as pretty, I became pretty. If you think you are ugly, you will be ugly, mark my words. I even think depression is caused by thinking about things that depress you. I feel that if you think positively, things will turn out for the better. It’s also a matter of good taste to talk about only happy things.”“Have you taught me to have good taste, Mama? Is that another trick of the trade I haven’t learned?” Mary Anne said.“Good taste is not something you can be taught. It’s not something you obtain in a store or go to college to learn. You either have it or you don’t. It is passed down from generation to generation in a straight line, but not everybody in a family gets it. It’s like high cheekbones. Your father will never have good taste and I will never be without it. You could drain every drop of blood from my body and what was left would include my innate good taste.”

I expect I'm always going to compare all of Pat Conroy's works, every one, to "The Lords Of Discipline". At the same time, I expect I will always be comparing other works of fiction, any and all, to those of Pat Conroy.I'd hate to just say, "You can see where 'The Lords of Discipline' came from" because this novel is too good to just be summed up as forever standing in the shadow of Conroy's most famous book. That is true, however. This isn't, I feel, quite so good a book as "The Lords of Discipline", but it's darned close. It is a simple matter for me to understand how, four years after "The Great Santini", a book whose very name is legend followed. Such novels as that don't happen overnight. It took time for Conroy to get to that point. Perhaps the best way I could sum up how Conroy writes in this book, the overall flow and feel of it, would be to liken it and Conroy's next book to a batch of cookies. Sure, this one is maybe a little burnt here, maybe a little burnt there. But it's a real good cookie nonetheless. A cookie that happens to be sitting in the middle of an on-and-off bar fight.Anyway, the book's namesake is the boisterous, charismatic and flawed LTC "Bull" Meecham, head of a household not run, but commanded, by the self-proclaimed greatest fighter pilot of all time. A warrior without a war, Meecham runs his family as he runs his Marine fighter squadron, demanding much of his children, his wife, and his pilots.He is, by the end of the book, easy to love and hate at the same time. The Meecham children certainly take such an attitude towards Bull, wanting him to be their father while he insists on spending more of his time being their commander.Ben Meecham, who, like Will McLean, is no doubt a character based to a fair degree on Conroy himself, is the main character of the book, and his relationship with Bull, mostly bad but sometimes good, is the center of much of the book since, in addition to being the main character, Ben is also the oldest. Like some of Conroy's other books, this one has basketball featured prominently. Ben Meecham has a great love for that game, as surely does Conroy.Anyone who's grown up in a military family will surely identify with the way of life that the Meechams live. Their lives have been dominated from the very beginning by their father's career, and as often as not this leaves them with little love for the Corps to which Bull is so fully dedicated.I don't want to to into telling the entire plot, but the book, and its namesake, go a long way through its 440 pages. When you meet Bull Meecham, after crashing a Navy captain's dinner, he is cheerfully running turtles over on the highway at night as his family moves yet again. When he leaves us, and his family, you will likely still hate him, but you'll miss him, too. Bull is both deeply caring and horribly cruel, a magnificent man and a glaringly flawed one.This particular edition of "The Great Santini" is 440 pages long, paperback, published in December 1987 by Bantam Books. I particularly like this version of it, since the artwork and cover text is much the same as one edition of "The Lords of Discipline". The illustrations make little sense before you read the book. By the time you have finished, you'll know what all of them mean. Never fails, and it's a characteristic I've found unique to Conroy novels. So many others have illustrations, sure, but no other author has managed to find cover art quite like this. It tells a story, all by itself.

Main theme is US Marine corps .colonel Bull Meecham main character. He is a bully, who is frequently drunk, beats his gentle wife and children. He is portrayed as a god fearing Catholic man.The character calls himself « The Great Santini ». To me the contradictions in the character (god fearing on the one hand, yet filled with violence & hate on the other) are totally unbelievable.Don’t waste your money!

Great book … if you like Pat Conroy, the author, then it’s a great read

I happened to read The Great Santini after The Prince of Tides and Beach Music, and the novel stood out as much more linear and simple than the latter; you feel almost like reading a juvenile work, lacking the complexity, the depth and breadth of the later books.Conroy relies here more on a descriptive style rather than the evocative/imaginative one that you would find in TPOT and BM, hence the story is rendered as one-dimensional compared to the more complex articulation of his other books; the prose is less lyric than realistic, and it flows quite quickly. So, this is an easy to read book, which I also found useful to better understand the context behind his other works. This is clearly an autobiographic book, Ben Meecham is Tom Conroy and Bull/The Great Santini his father, so one can find here some of the themes that will be developed in more depth and with more texture in his later stories. With that said, I thought the story lacked some drama, in the end it comes down t the depiction of a day-to-day family routines with their usual problems; yes, there is an underlying ongoing tension all along but it remains latent most of the time, so the story is entertaining but not riveting as I would have expected.

The lyrical Pat Conroy at his best. His description of the mother just sings! Coming of age in the south, in a difficult family told with such depth and grace! The various chapters of Ben's journey to manhood are so deliciously described that one is transported into his skin and invited to experience each part of the journey in a way rich enough to make it your own. His low country south is an indelible character in this novel as in all his novels. Memorable.

What it's like to grow up as the child of a Marine, has a lasting effect on one's personality. great story by Conroy. Felt like it was a true story.