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    A Summons to Memphis
    A Summons to Memphis
    A Summons to Memphis
    Audiobook6 hours

    A Summons to Memphis

    Written by Peter Taylor

    Narrated by Boyd Gaines

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Born in 1917, Tennessee author Peter Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for this exceptional work of literature. The New York Times Book Review calls this "a beautiful ironic novel," and Kirkus Reviews hails it as "every inch the classic." The well-to-do Carver family moves to Memphis from Nashville, where they become embroiled in a domestic dispute over the widower patriarch's decision to remarry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 19, 2008
    ISBN9781436147651
    A Summons to Memphis

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    Reviews for A Summons to Memphis

    3.5/5

    197 ratings15 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The premise of this short Pulitzer Prize winning novel sounded appealing - a grown up son is summoned back to Memphis by his two spinster sisters to stop his widowed father is planning to get married to a younger (read gold digger) woman. So far, so me - I love a well executed family drama. However, Pulitzer Prize or not, I found this novel to be really lacking, and can't for the life of me figure out why it was considered prize-worthy.It's a short novel (just over 200 pages), yet it was over two-thirds of the way into the story before our narrator got anywhere near the plane to bring him back to Memphis (and then it took him quite a few pages to even get off the damn plane once it landed). I could easily forgive that if Taylor was busy building wonderful characters, but I cared even less about the characters when I finally (with relief) shut the cover for the last time than I did at the beginning. More to the point, I was annoyed that I was wasting precious hours of my life being abjectly bored by them. He spent most of the book going around and around a loop telling us about his spinster sisters and his father like some painful literary Groundhog Day, and that's exactly what it was - telling. . 2.5 stars - utterly snooze-inducing narration with one dimensional characters. Did Taylor have a secret family member on the Pulitzer panel that year?
    • 3/5
      Peter Taylor is highly regarded for his short stories, and has won both a PEN/Faulkner and a PEN/Malamud award for those, as well as a Pulitzer for this particular novel. While I appreciated this story of a man's reflections on his family life, I did not love it. I found the style rambling, repetitive and a tad navel-gazey. There is a nifty little tale of revenge embedded in all that, but it is not the narrator's focus, and it could have been told to better effect on its own merits in a short story, I feel. Phillip Carver is a middle-aged man, called back from his separate existence in New York City to Memphis by his two older sisters, to deal with the issue of their father's intent to re-marry. The relationships of youth, his sisters' and his own, as well as their mother's personality shift and extended invalidism are examined at length, always in context of their father's long-ago betrayal by a business associate, and the "new start" in Memphis that defined all their lives from that point forward. While there is no overt bitterness toward Dad for uprooting the family from their native Nashville or his tendency to direct and control their lives, each of Carver, Sr's children took their own way out of his sphere of influence, until the day came when the tables could finally be turned. My problem with all the reflection and introspection is that it doesn't seem to lead anywhere---Phillip doesn't really learn anything useful about himself, and he isn't any more interesting or likeable at the end than he was at the beginning. (His habit of always referring to his sisters as "middle-aged", or "stout" in the narration, and of subtly belittling their manner of dress and their social lives for the reader's benefit really got irritating.) I suspect a bit of autobiography in this novel, and its presentation does not endear me to the author.
    • 5/5
      A very strange thing happened while reading this book. I took it on a trip to New York, and upon returning home, I forgot about it completely and started reading something else. A few weeks later, I started thinking about Stone Mountain (Georgia) and recalling a scene set there that I had read in a novel. It took me a few seconds to remember which book. Once I did, I struggled to try to remember how the book ended. I even checked LibraryThing to see if I had written a review, which I do for every book I finish. There was none. I found the book in one of my several computer bags and started reading where I left off. Despite the passage of time, the story was still quite clear in my head. Perhaps this is the difference between a work of "serious fiction" and the types of novel I usually read. In those novels, mostly mysteries, there are events galore, but they tend to run together and be forgotten. They are contrived to create a puzzle that can be solved. Real life isn't like that, and neither is A Summons to Memphis.The story moves slowly-at least the part taking place in the present. A son, Philip Carver, living in New York as a collector and seller of antiquarian books, is called back to Memphis by his two older, spinster sisters who are trying to prevent their 81-year old father from remarrying. But neither that trip nor subsequent ones goes as planned. The novel defies your expectations about plot, and you realize it is a book, like so many great Southern novels, about history and family and place-all magnified and distorted through the son's resentment of his father for uprooting the family from Nashville to Memphis, then later stopping his plans to marry the girl he met on Stone Mountain. As the son's relationship with his father evolves through the present-day scenes in the novel, the real story of forgetting and forgiving that is the book's center is told.If a great book requires great events or a cast of thousands, this is not a great book. But if a great book is judged on its telling details about a small number of characters, details that ring true even if those fictional lives are far from our own, then perhaps A Summons to Memphis is a great book. It is these small details that linger with us, such as Philip Carver's dismissal of his friend Alex Mercer's idea near the end of the book, or of Alex's own close relationship with Philip's father, begun in childhood, but extending through the years when Philip was living in New York. So many great books hinge on the honest portrayal of the relationship between and among family and friends. In this quiet, reflective novel, Peter Taylor has shone a light into the lives, pent-up frustrations, and (I think) the ultimate failure of this family to ever honestly come to grips with its feelings about one another. Each has lived his or her life in a way to send messages to the others about their feelings and resentments but has never managed to speak about them openly. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve, and only the portion of happiness they have allowed themselves to have.As I wrote this review and reflected more on what lingered and what it all meant, I added a half star to my LibraryThing review (making it 4 ½ stars). This is a book that demands the reader give it a little more thought and consideration than it at first appears to require. I suspect its implications will continue to linger with me.
    • 4/5
      So much is conveyed in a very short novel. The narration is interesting with the story moving back and forth in time. Sometimes the reader participates in the narrator's growing self-awareness. In order to accomplish this, elements of the story seem repetitive as Philip anticipates, goes through and then goes over events in his mind. The author brings the time and place to life (Nashville/Memphis in the 1930's - 60s) and it is possible to sympathize with all of the characters and appreciate them in this place and beyond.
    • 3/5
      3.5***

      Philip Carver has escaped his controlling father and now lives in New York with his much younger Jewish girlfriend. But when he gets a surprise phone call from his older sister, followed only minutes later by a call from his second sister, and then from an old family friend, he knows he has been summoned to Memphis to help deal with the “disaster.” A mere two years after his mother’s death, his 80-something father has plans to remarry and his adult children have no intention of letting him do so.

      George Carver has always been the head of his family, and while he was gentlemanly and generous with his children he also thwarted any potential romantic relationship they might have. It began when he moves his family to Memphis from Nashville after he has been financially ruined and socially humiliated by a long-term friend and colleague. He ensures that his sons and daughters also break off all ties with Nashville. In Memphis, the family seems to find the new start they needed. They are members of the best country club, the girls join the Junior League, they live in a lovely home – they are just like any other wealthy and well-born Memphis family.

      The children love and respect their father, but they rebel in quiet ways to distance themselves and find independence. Now, some thirty years after their move, the middle-aged sisters will get their revenge by controlling their widower father, and prohibiting any kind of romance in his life as he once ended their own hopes of romance.

      Taylor gives us a work that explores the complex relationships within one family – the wrongs done to one another, resentment built over decades, petty reprisals, and subtle revenge. I usually enjoy character-based novels. I loved Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Paul Harding’s Tinkers, and this work reminds me of those. But this is a very slow read, and I’m struggling with what to write because I’m not really sure how to react to these characters. The last twenty or so pages are poignant and lovely, and I finally felt some connection to Philip and his father and sisters.
    • 3/5
      Good to great writing. Hard to digest on what it's really about, unreliable narrator? Perhaps.
    • 3/5
      What is Southern literature? Ask people this question and you might get different answers.The first and most obvious answer is that Southern literature must embody a strong sense of place in the writing. A “Southern" story or novel takes its time to describe the landscape. Or perhaps the language or dialect in a first paragraph will immediately place the reader in the South. Other people declare that literature written by anyone born in the South or living there is automatically considered “Southern Lit." This particular kind of literature not only focuses on place, but place is usually entwined with narratives about complex or large family relationships, an adherence to or struggle with religion, or capturing the history of a particular Southern community.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this book. The main character (I don't have the book right here and I'm too lazy to look it up) grew up in Nashville and moved with his family to Memphis when he was in his early teens. The story takes place when he's in his 40s, living in New York. Both of his sisters and his father still lived in Memphis and were products of the social structure there. He was above it and found the whole thing to be quite ridiculous.Upon his mother's death, he received several phone calls from his sisters, summoning him to Memphis, because his 80 year old father was marrying some young hussy. The story was mostly told through flash backs and memories of his younger days in Memphis.The story was told very slowly and intimately. It really felt like I was sitting down with a close friend and he was slowly uncovering fascinating stories from his childhood in the south.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating, short novel about family relationships, place, and self-knowledge. Phillip Carver, a middle-aged book editor working in New York City, receives urgent phone calls from both of his elder sisters, Betsy and Josephine - their elderly, widowed father has suddenly decided upon remarriage to a much younger woman, and the sisters want Phillip's help in dissuading him from his plans. I'd like to say that this phone call sets off the events of the novel, but there aren't many "events" to speak of - the book is a lyrical, introspective journey through Phillip's psyche, in which the events of his journey home to Memphis are interspersed with his memories of his childhood and family life.Writing a novel like this is risky; there isn't much in the way of action, just Phillip and his reminiscences. Everything depends on atmosphere, characterization, and careful pacing. Peter Taylor overcomes the difficulties, and then some: the book is tautly paced, with fragmentary clues leading the reader on to new revelations about the characters. If this sort of thoughtful character study appeals to you (which, to many of the previous reviewers, it clearly did not), one could hardly ask for a better example of the genre.
    • 4/5
      Elegantly written story of a family interrupted when their father uproots them from Nashville to Memphis. This is just the sort of polite fiction that I enjoy.
    • 3/5
      While the characters and story are worthwhile in the end, the characters are fairly boring somewhat frustrating people that don't particularly engage my interest, and the story moves incredibly slowly. If you can get through it, you'll probably be glad you did, but it takes patience, and a willingness to move past the fact that you sometimes feel the characters, and or story, and or author, are rambling or have no destination.
    • 1/5
      I kept thinking this book was going to go somewhere but it never did. I am from the Memphis and now Nashville area so I enjoyed reading about the places that I am familiar with, but the story just had very little in the way of a plot. What little plot there was had been revealed within the first chapter.
    • 4/5
      Read this because of "Reading like a Writer". It was great. Maybe not the sort of book I would have enjoyed previously, but reading it slowly paying attention to the language, and spending a lot of time thinking about what the author was getting at made it very enjoyable. The theme of parents messing up your life without really meaning to really resonated with me, he seemed to be saying that you have to either forgive or forget, doesn't really matter which, but that revenge will just ruin your own life. At least I think that's what he was saying!
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written story of the return of a man to his Southern roots and the emotions the return dredges up.
    • 4/5
      Set in mid-Twentieth Century Tennessee, A Summons to Memphis is a delightful novel of manners that teaches the importance of going beyond forgetting, beyond even forgiving, and trying to actually understand our parents. Wonderful.