Word: phillipics
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...plot is easy to summarize, although not for the person who tells it. He is Phillip Carver, 49, a bachelor who learns from his two older sisters in Memphis that their father, 81 and a widower, is planning to remarry. Phillip believes he has long since escaped Memphis and old associations; he works for a publishing house in Manhattan and collects rare books. But his live-in girlfriend Holly has just moved out on him, and he is lonely and therefore vulnerable to appeals from the past. There is also the matter of his father's "not inconsiderable fortune...
That is not all he considers. Before he boards the airplane that will take him to Memphis, either to defend his father from his sisters or vice versa, Phillip picks through a tangled skein of memories. The crucial incident in the Carver history, as he sees it, occurred in 1931, when his father moved his family, his wife and four children, including the youngest, Phillip, 13, from Nashville to Memphis. George Carver, an eminently respectable lawyer, had been "deceived and nearly financially ruined" by his business association with a Nashville entrepreneur. Old-fashioned honor demanded a move to a place...
Other grievances swarm up from the past. Phillip recalls how his father prevented both daughters from marrying, scaring off suitors or using courtroom wiles to turn the impressionable girls into witnesses against their gentlemen friends. The third child, Georgie, was ostensibly so traumatized by family life that he volunteered for service in World War II with the sole intent of being killed, at which he succeeded. The old man also managed to put an end to Phillip's courtship of a "girl I was in love with in Chattanooga (and there has never been another)." As these remembrances and confessions...
...guilty finger in A Summons to Memphis seems to point nearly everywhere. Phillip's dry, punctilious narrative style hardly jibes with his claims to be a doomed romantic hero. Thinking back on the girl in Chattanooga, he remarks, "Surely no life was ever so quickly and completely transformed by love as mine was." Yet his only visible passion is self-absorption. He cannot even muster much interest in Alex Mercer, "my closest friend there in Memphis." He admits several times his inability to remember just how many children Alex and his wife possess...
...book filled with such inveterate egotists as the Carver clan ought not to be much fun. Yet A Summons to Memphis radiates tolerant good humor. For all of Phillip's flaws, he is a keen observer, witty monologist and an adept at anecdotes. He recalls, for example, the fate of another old Memphis widower who attempted to take a second wife: "When Mr. Joel's intention to remarry was made manifest he was actually hauled into court by his own children. (His sons were all lawyers, unhappily for him.) And there in court . . . Mr. Joel's sons had their father...