I’ve loved Peter Taylor’s short stories and was looking forward to spending more time with this eloquent writer. A Summons to Memphis has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while and in my determination to break my two year-long obsession with flash fiction and get into retraining my mind into holding onto a longer attention span.
One of the things I love about Taylor’s writing is his easy way of getting the reader invested in his story. Here’s how the book opens:
The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved–especially when there are unmarried daughters. (p. 3)
And with that simple opening sentence, Taylor has laid out the premise of his novel. A conflict within a family is always high drama, and it always promises intriguing characters. In this case, even without knowing anything about the family, the place, the era, we already know we can expect some interesting situations here.
Next, in the second sentence of the book, Taylor lays out the setting:
This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-odd years ago.
There ya go: time and place. All this information and we don’t even know the POV and who the narrator of our tale might be. Taylor makes every word work. “Landlocked, backwater” certainly tells us quite a lot about the provincial nature of the environment, and likely, the characters and how they can be expected to behave.
What we come to find out soon enough is that the narrator is a man who was born in Nashville, had to move with his family to Memphis, a move precipitated by a betrayal by his lawyer father’s client. Taylor deftly switched present to past while getting us caught up on the family history without turning it into an info dump. The title of the book quickly is explained by a phone call from the narrator’s sisters outlining the situation which Taylor mentions in his opening line. Their father is considering marriage to a young woman and the women are requesting their brother’s help in getting the situation fixed.
Taylor’s digging up of the background of this family, focusing on their being uprooted from a happy life in Nashville and being transplanted into a complete new world in Memphis, is exceptional. He manages to cover each character and their personal turmoils and changes while revealing the change in their relationships to each other.
And, Taylor maintains a mystery whilst giving us all this background information: the heart of the story. The whole reason behind the big move to Memphis and the type of man the father really is, particularly since it has been noted in the opening that he will be the cause of coming conflict within the family. But here’s the mystery: What exactly happened between the father and his partner, Mr. Lewis Shackleford?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology