. Spinning .

I can see where some of today’s readers may feel that this book is boring, lacking real page-turning excitement, and perhaps even call it a navel-gazer. It is, despite the potential for a collision course set by the narrator in the first couple pages, indeed a subtle character analysis. And, while the book is spent in background information that is meant to build up to the present scenario and give it its impact, the information is mainly the narrator’s opinions on his family interaction and how he expects the characters to react to a family crisis.

The basic premise is a scenario that begins with phone calls from the narrator, Phillip’s, two older sisters, quite upset that their widowed wealthy father is about to remarry a younger woman. Phillip’s reflections on his relationship with his father, a rather distant one that he’s escaped to do his own thing in New York City, and the family dynamics between the two spinster sisters and their father, who seem to manipulate the old man in a passive-aggressive resentment.

Taylor lays out an upheaval of the family when the girls were young women and Phillip was an adolescent, where a rift between their father, a lawyer, and his good friend and client, Mr. Lewis Shackleford, causes the family great personal loss and forces them to move from Nashville to Memphis. Taylor does not explain exactly what happened, and I tend to feel that we, like the children, are not supposed to “discuss” it.

Phillip has also been in touch with his childhood friend, Alex Mercer, and it’s another curious relationship as Alex bonded closer with Phillip’s father even as a child, and continued a fairly close communication over the decades.

What all this builds up to, via Phillip’s thoughts as he prepares to answer his sisters’ “summons to Memphis” to supposedly prevent the marriage of his father, would, one might think, be the major dramatic confrontation of the story. Taylor, however, handles it quickly, follows through a time beyond it, and focuses instead on another relationship, that of Phillip and his live-in girlfriend, Holly Kaplan. Even another summons to Memphis brought about by another near-crisis situation (as estimated by his two sisters), turns into more of a settling in for Phillip, a coming-to-terms of his past, his present, and his future.

Taylor wraps the drama up fairly quickly at the end, really, downplaying any expected conflict and focusing instead on how the conflicts are handled by the characters, and how changes, particularly in Phillip and in his girlfriend, Holly, are slowly brought about by events and the distance of time.

It’s an exquisite book on family dynamics and how one is influenced through a lifetime by the past, and how one’s perceptions of the past can be changed by changing one’s own values and priorities. Few writers could bring this slowly told tale along with such depth and subtlety. Taylor skillfully has done so.

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.

Aside from the phone call (the “Summons”) in the beginning of the book, there is little–maybe no–dialogue in this narrative. What Taylor is doing–and I’m halfway through–is describing the characters as seen by the narrator in the first person point of view. His method of doing this is by filling the reader in on details of the family’s move from Nashville to Memphis, focusing on the narrator’s two sisters and his father, with a brief explanation of the current whereabouts and status of the narrator himself (New York, live-in girlfriend), and reminding the reader occasionally about the circumstances that require him to respond to the request that he come down to Memphis himself to assist (his father planning marriage).

In the last chapter the narrator has moved onto some background on another character, his best boyhood friend Alex. He is giving us some grounding in the way he and Alex became friends, and more, how Alex and the narrator’s father had automatically formed a close relationship that the narrator himself didn’t manage to establish with his own father.

With all this in-depth perspective on the characters, we get a very clear picture through situations and events of the characters and yet, it is still that; the narrator’s perspective. While we can certainly choose to believe that he believes what he tells us, is it not still a biased view? Does this come under the trust of the reader to believe the narrator’s opinions as being truth or must we take him at his word that what he tells us about these folks is a pretty accurate picture?

Doesn’t this always come into play with the first person pov?

Two chapters into this now and I would say that Taylor paints with a thin brush. By this I mean that his characters, which I’m taking to be the most important focus of the novel, are being revealed so slowly, so meticulously painted in detail, and all via interaction over events that are relatively minor–or at least common to most family dynamics.

The move from Nashville to Memphis has of course been the first major upheaval in their lives and would obviously effect change in each character’s handling of the sudden tearing up of roots. The impetus, the falling out between the father and his legal client, Shackleford, is placed at the heart of the story and yet, the details of this, of what actually happened (theft? loyalty? dishonor? lies?) are not given at all. So the spotlight then falls on the move and its impact on the individuals.

The narrator was around thirteen at the time, had an older brother (who was killed in the war, though I’m not sure exactly at what point of the story), a loving, nurturing mother, a busy but loving father, and two older sisters. The oldest sister, Betsy, was blonde and outgoing, and engaged. The younger, Josephine, was dark-haired and though beautiful, was more intimidated by her older sister’s popularity and lacked confidence.

The changes start almost immediately, before the physical abandoning of the family home. The mother warns the children of their father’s fragile mental state over what has happened to necessitate the move, so that if the name “Mr. Lewis Shackleford” is never to be mentioned, then we find ourselves a bit anxious and disappointed that we, the reader, may never find out the truth–and we were so close!

Betsy’s engagement appears to be in no danger of not transcending the physical distance between her and her fiancee, but we see a new development in the father during the caravan of cars’ ride between Nashville and Memphis. Betsy’s fiancee is along for the ride, and at a stop at a diner, Betsy and he go off to sit at a table where they’ve spotted some friends. Then, they make a decision to lag behind the family to spend a tad more time with these friends. The father takes this as an affront, as we see that having lost his business, perhaps his pride, and his roots, he pulls his family in closer to him as his last sense of grounding and authority. He immediately starts putting doubts in Betsy’s head about her fiancee and does create a friction that causes them to break up.

Josephine on the other hand has felt as a flop in Nashville, bad luck and circumstances and following in the tracks of a much more gregarious and comely older sister, so that Memphis, to her, holds hope of a new beginning, maybe even a second debut into society which might afford her a better chance at finding a beau. And it does–even without the debut–however, their is an unexplainable resentment built up against her not by her sister, but by her mother and her father at her ease in settling into their new environment. Her honesty at being displaced is offset by their stiff upper lipped handling prior to the move, and now they likely are growing weary of the act.

Despite this, the father is more successful in Memphis than he’d ever been in Nashville–that should make him happy. And the mother has become more of a social butterfly in her new surroundings.

What I find interesting is that Peter Taylor has managed to give us these subtle personality changes via little, almost meaningless vignettes of events, progressing the story to build the characters and (likely) eventually round them out completely by the time we get back to the phone call many years later that will bring them all together again.

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?