That particular piece of foreboding begins on the first page of the first chapter, but we have already been treated to a prologue that breaks two of Leonard’s rules: “Avoid prologues” and “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” Conroy’s entire prologue is a description, of “the storied peninsula of Charleston,” where the metalwork is—of course—“delicate as lace” and even the “camellias seem embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods.” Not only is Leo, bless his heart, forced by his creator to “carry the delicate beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk,” his very soul is “peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen.”

Whew. That’s a whole lot of “pretty words” to plow through, not to mention a bit of a burden for Leo, a slight, geeky thing who is toting more than his share of baggage. The thing is, once we finally get at Leo—and this is where Conroy shows his charm—I really like him. He’s nice to eccentric old people, he tries hard to understand (and mind) his difficult mother, he means well almost all the time (though sometimes in ways that are too superhuman to believe, as when he brokers a peace between the black students and the white students on the first day of forced integration in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1969). One of the best scenes in the book is a lovely set piece in which he performs his morning paper route. When Leo is allowed to simply be, when he is left alone to deliver papers, to act rather than be described, he is a mostly winning, remarkably cheerful fellow. So it is that midway into the book and well into his thirties, when he starts up—again—about his “lacerated” soul and “melancholy heart,” I want to say, “What on earth is the matter with you, man? Buck up.”

Early on we learn that: Leo’s beloved older brother killed himself at ten and Leo found the body; he has a mental collapse and later takes the rap for a drug offense he didn’t commit; his wife is both orphaned and crazy. The problem lies in the fact that we’ve only been supplied with the litany of Leo’s pain; we’ve never actually been allowed to feel it, because Conroy is too busy telling about the downward spiral we never get to see. I know Leo has “alleyways” inside him “that were dead ends and led to nowhere”; I know about “the mansions forming like jewels in [his] bloodstream.” But for the life of me I cannot figure out what that means, much less what it means to him.

And yet, as Conroy himself might write, and yet: I stuck with it! I read the whole book in two sittings—hell, I’ve read most of the books in two sittings. Conroy so clearly means well, and he’s so admirable in his scope and ambition, in his sheer energy and devotion to his subjects, that in the end, even the most skeptical reader is left with something akin to awe. In almost all of his books, there is at least one plotline working off various bugbears of the times. (In The Prince of Tides, Luke Wingo martyrs himself fighting against a nuclear power company; in South of Broad there is desegregation and the foray into the San Francisco of the 1980s.) There are also logic-defying plot twists and tie-ups (a pet tiger tears the face of a rapist; a faceless daddy comes back from the dead). Conroy is the literary equivalent of the Energizer Bunny, plumbing and replumbing the same old pain and terrain for the sake of a rollicking tale.

You have to hand it to him. And I do. I just wish the hardest working man in show biz would take a cue from another tortured son of the South. I am speaking here of Elvis and his plea for “a little less conversation, a little more action.” Elmore Leonard could not have said it better.