Taylor does a great job of building up by providing the basis. From the title through the description of setting (or environment that is truly necessary to the story), the reader is given all the details of time, place, characters, and events leading up the phone call (the Summons) that will bring him in alignment with the narrator’s mood, reflection, current situation, and expectations. Because this is done through the narrator’s first person point of view, we must accept that he is at the least, giving us an honest assessment of his family and background according to his cumulative experience.
I questioned his reliability at one point. But then, isn’t every narrator, particularly in first person, giving us his perspective?
Back to the story, which is simply about a couple phone calls to Philip (narrator), as the son of an elderly wealthy widower in Memphis, from his two middle-aged spinster sisters, outlining their fear that their father is about to get married again. Philip has brought us up to date on his childhood under an overbearing and distant father, an ineffective mother, an older brother who escaped into his own brief freedom (to end up killed in the war) and his two older sisters who have in their own way, with both a love and resentment towards their father, have manipulated him over the years. Their fear of losing him to a new wife is real.
What surprised me is that when Taylor brings us, after three-quarters of the book being the setting-up, into the actual visit home, it is an amazingly brief scenario. One would have expected a major conflict, a huge bomb that had been ticking for 150 pages finally exploding. It doesn’t. We wonder why.
Ah, but therein lies Taylor’s skill. We remember how deeply he has our narrator thinking about his life and all the characters. About his close boyhood friend, Alex Mercer who to a certain degree, without planning it, took Philip’s place in his father’s life in a close bonding. We see Philip’s little discoveries made in his reflections, and how his opinions of his sisters evolve into a clearer picture of what brought them to this place in time and how and why they managed to disburse a subtle revenge on their father over the years.
Taylor thus has us realizing that the theme of the story is family dynamics and how individuals are affected by the interaction. What has been maintained as a thin thread throughout–Philip’s relationship with his father, with Alex, and with his live-in but currently absent girlfriend, Holly–all comes into play just as any family crisis or major event brings out long-hidden memories and emotions that must be faced.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology