Several years ago, The New York Times ran a series called “Writers on Writing,” in which American authors wrote about how they go about the process of their craft. In his installment, Elmore Leonard offered up ten rules he said helped him “show rather than tell” what’s taking place in the story. “If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules.” You could almost feel the sly beat before he added: “Still, you might look them over.”

That last line could have been directly addressed to Pat Conroy, the enormously popular writer of such epic epics as The Lords of Discipline (512 pages), The Prince of Tides (567 pages), and Beach Music (800 pages). His latest, the much-anticipated South of Broad, is Conroy’s first novel in fourteen years, and at 512 pages, it—like its predecessors—is all but groaning with language and imagery, not to mention the voice of the author, who clearly has no wish to stay “invisible.” His fans, and they are legion, will be delighted.

They will also be highly familiar with his theme. By now Conroy has become the official scribe of a certain kind of South: a nostalgic, still-benighted place, heavily populated with dysfunctional families and marked by episodes of raw violence. Erskine Caldwell meets Margaret Mitchell meets Thomas Wolfe (one of Conroy’s heroes). His protagonists are all Southern boys trying to grow into Southern men but stymied by memories of tortured childhoods and oppressors who range from alcoholic fathers and controlling mothers to the members of the Charleston Yacht Club. They are prone to grandiose gestures (building coffins for stillborn siblings or dying mothers); they are big on dramatic rescues (a porpoise from an aquarium, a dying friend from AIDS-ravaged San Francisco). They spend a lot of time rooting around in the complex geography of their own wounded hearts. (“Of all the friends I have,” says Leo King, the narrator of South of Broad, “I think Chad Rutledge and I understand each other along every latitude or longitude of our melancholy hearts, and along the breathless equator of our poor, lacerated souls.”) They also make clear that their injuries could not possibly have been acquired anywhere else. (“My wound is geography,” Tom Wingo says in The Prince of Tides. “It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”)

Now, Conroy is hardly the first Southerner who is crazy about the sound of his own voice, and there is no question that Conroy can spin a good yarn. It’s just that he spins and spins—and tells and tells—packing every page with florid description and over-amped emotion. His characters contend with all kinds of terrible stuff, but he works so hard setting it up and then reminds us again and again how terrible it all is, that the events themselves pale in comparison with the fuss he makes. When he tries so hard to create the drama with the writing, the writing becomes the drama.

Clearly there are a lot of folks to whom this appeals. I am thinking of my fellow Southerners especially, or at least that subset of folks who, like Tom Wingo, get a charge out of running their fingers over old wounds. They derive a second-hand sense of pride by carrying the burdens of our past, are bound to “the land, Katie Scarlett, the land,” even though home might be a suburb off I-85 and their biggest burden is a mortgage. Conroy reinforces this dramatic view of ourselves, and therein, I think, lies the key to much of his popularity.

This is Elmore Leonard  quoting a John Steinbeck character in Sweet Thursday: “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle…Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

To read Conroy is to wonder what it would be like without the considerable hooptedoodle. It is to wonder how South of Broad, for example, would unfold if he refrained from letting you know ahead of time that fate, the archenemy of all his protagonists, is now heading for poor old Leo in a barrage of mixed metaphors: “It would be many years before I learned that your fate could scuttle up behind you, touch you with its bloody claws…cat-footed, unavoidable, and bloodthirsty.”