Great Santini (Conroy)

The Great Santini
Pat Conroy, 1976
Bantam Books
489 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553381559

Summary  
The Great Santini takes us into the family life of a fighter pilot. Bull Meecham is the epitome of the Marine officer — as tough a disciplinarian at home as at the base. Rebellion, or even difference of opinion, is not tolerated. Objections are met with the statement "The Great Santini has spoken." As the oldest child, Ben takes the brunt of his father's criticism. His attempts to stand up for himself or his mother and sister are contemptuously dismissed. His feelings for his father are a mixture of hate and fear, reluctant pride in his prowess, and unacknowledged love.

The Marine Corps and flying are the most important things in Bull's life. Next come his image as a tough guy, the Catholic Church, his old buddies, and his wife and children. His sons are destined to become Marine pilots, his daughters to provide their husbands (Marines, naturally) with a good home and more fodder for the Corps.

Ben is eighteen and a born athlete. So his father's fierce drive for a successful son is concentrated on him, and nothing less than perfection is considered acceptable — a perfection of which Bull is the sole judge. Ben must learn that, in a game, sportsmanship should go by the board when necessary; what matters is winning, regardless of the means.

This is the story of a boy's determination to be himself, whatever that may be. It is violent, shocking, funny, moving, and overwhelmingly real. From the early pages, with Bull's wife and children waiting at the airport to welcome The Great Santini back into their midst, to the bittersweet ending, the reader's interest and emotions are fixed upon the fluctuating fortunes of the Meecham family. (From the publisher.)

The Great Santini was adapted to film in 1979 with Robert Duval as Bull Meechem and Blythe Danner as Lillian.

Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1945
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., The Citadel
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California, and Fripp
  Island, South, Carolina


Pat Conroy was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a young career military officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom Pat often credits for his love of language. He was the first of seven children.

His father was a violent and abusive man, a man whose biggest mistake, Conroy once said, was allowing a novelist to grow up in his home, a novelist "who remembered every single violent act.... My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life." Since the family had to move many times to different military bases around the South, Pat changed schools frequently, finally attending the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, upon his father's insistence. While still a student, he wrote and then published his first book, The Boo, a tribute to a beloved teacher.

After graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married a young woman with two children, a widow of the Vietnam War. He then accepted a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, a remote island off the South Carolina shore. After a year, Pat was fired for his unconventional teaching practices—such as his unwillingness to allow corporal punishment of his students—and for his general lack of respect for the school's administration. Conroy evened the score when he exposed the racism and appalling conditions his students endured with the publication of The Water is Wide in 1972. The book won Conroy a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into the feature film Conrack, starring Jon Voight.

Writings
Following the birth of a daughter, the Conroys moved to Atlanta, where Pat wrote his novel, The Great Santini, published in 1976. This autobiographical work, later made into a powerful film starring Robert Duvall, explored the conflicts of his childhood, particularly his confusion over his love and loyalty to an abusive and often dangerous father.

The publication of a book that so painfully exposed his family's secret brought Conroy to a period of tremendous personal desolation. This crisis resulted not only in his divorce but the divorce of his parents; his mother presented a copy of The Great Santini to the judge as "evidence" in divorce proceedings against his father.

The Citadel became the subject of his next novel, The Lords of Discipline, published in 1980. The novel exposed the school's harsh military discipline, racism and sexism. This book, too, was made into a feature film.

Pat remarried and moved from Atlanta to Rome where he began The Prince of Tides which, when published in 1986, became his most successful book. Reviewers immediately acknowledged Conroy as a master storyteller and a poetic and gifted prose stylist. This novel has become one of the most beloved novels of modern time—with over five million copies in print, it has earned Conroy an international reputation. The Prince of Tides was made into a highly successful feature film directed by Barbra Streisand, who also starred in the film opposite Nick Nolte, whose brilliant performance won him an Oscar nomination.

Beach Music (1995), Conroy's sixth book, was the story of Jack McCall, an American who moves to Rome to escape the trauma and painful memory of his young wife's suicidal leap off a bridge in South Carolina. The story took place in South Carolina and Rome, and also reached back in time to the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. This book, too, was a tremendous international bestseller.

While on tour for Beach Music, members of Conroy's Citadel basketball team began appearing, one by one, at his book signings around the country. When his then-wife served him divorce papers while he was still on the road, Conroy realized that his team members had come back into his life just when he needed them most. And so he began reconstructing his senior year, his last year as an athlete, and the 21 basketball games that changed his life. The result of these recollections, along with flashbacks of his childhood and insights into his early aspirations as a writer, is My Losing Season, Conroy's seventh book and his first work of nonfiction since The Water is Wide.

South of Broad, published in 2009, 14 years after Beach Music, tells the story of friendships, first formed in high school, that span two decades.

In 2013, Conroy published his memoir, The Death of Santini, in which he revealed in greater detail his childhool and family life, especially the brutality of his father. Eventually, however, before his father's death, Pat and his father achieved peace, and Pat learned to forgive.

He currently lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina with his wife, the novelist Cassandra King. (Adapted from the author's website and Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Stinging authenticity.... A book that won't quit.
Atlanta Journal


A fine, funny, brawling book.... Domineering, authoritarian, selfish, arbitrary, even cruel, relegating all that is gentle or sensitive to the domain of women, his father is a Marine pilot who runs his household with all the kindness and understanding of a drill instructor shaping up a bunch of raw recruits.
National Observer

Compelling storytelling.... Conroy takes aim at our darkest emotions, lets the arrow fly and hits a bulls-eye almost every time.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Few novelists write as well and not as beautifully.
Lexington Herald-Leader

Book Club Discussion Questions 

Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Great Santini: 

1. The most obvious place to start is with Bull Meecham. Describe the kind of a man he is...as a father and husband ...as well as a military commander? What "code," or set of beliefs, does he operate under?

2. What is Bull Meecham's affect on his family, particularly his son Ben? Is it possible to love such a man as Bull? Does Bull love his family?

3. Talk about those times that Meecham can be endearing and the other times he is cruel? Recall, especially, the basketball game between Ben and his father?

4. Talk about Lillian Meecham and her relationship with her husband and children, especially with Mary Anne? What role does she play in the dysfunctional household? Would you describe her as a passive southern belle?

5. What role does school play in young Ben's life? What does it provide him with that his family, especially his father, cannot?

6. Conroy has said that "one of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family." Care to comment on that?

7. Ben defies his father to help a friend. Ultimately, who is more of a man in the Meecham household—young Ben or his father? In fact, what does it mean to be "a man"?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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