The Great Santini: A Novel
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- ISBN13: 9780553381559
- Condition: New
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Product Description
Step into the powerhouse life of Bull Meecham. He’s all Marine-fighter pilot, king of the clouds, and absolute ruler of his family tree. Lillian is his wife—gorgeous, southern-bred, with a core of velvet steel. Lacking her cool head, her kids would be in real distress.
Ben is the oldest, a born athlete whose best never satisfies the huge man. Ben’s got to stand up, even fight back, against a father who doesn’t give in—not to his men, not to his wife, and certainly not to his son.
Bull Meecham is undoubtedly PAT CONROY’S most explosive character—
a man you should despise, but a man you will like.
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Excellent intentions but the characters fall fleeting. The book is full of vital life lessons. The problem is the people learning them are unrealistic. First, the oldest, Ben, for a seventeen/eighteen year ancient he’s very immature. When you read the book it’ll be obvious to you, the reader, what I mean about Ben’s immaturity. The second oldest, Mary Anne, is smarter but too cynical to pity. She gets herself and Ben in distress so many times with her cynicism that the reader can’t judge she wouldn’t have learned her lesson after the 100th time. I don’t have many gripes about the additional kids because they acted their age while Ben and Mary Anne acted their age too.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Just like the title character of this book, the novel itself is powerful but flawed. While I was caught up in the maelstrom of family tree relations and spellbound by the character of Bull Meecham, there were too many times where events where whipped up and then cut off, leaving the reader with no resolution. It was ridiculous the way Conroy skipped describing the after effects of traumatic events on the family tree dynamics, which is the reason we’re all reading the book in the first place.
Also, while the descriptions of Bull’s experience while flying and his thoughts of what a fighter pilot is were poetic, they really didn’t add to the tale and became repetitive by the end of the book.
I would recommend this book if you haven’t read a real powerful novel before (and Sheldon and Steel don’t count) but if you’ve read about real family tree dysfunction in additional excellent novels, this one doesn’t really go all the way.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Summer 2004 Reading List – Mini Review
The Fantastic Santini is a pretty excellent coming of age tale. It is not terrible as an embracing-your-southern-heritage tale. But it shines when it humanizes a monster of a Dad and shows how families of dysfunction run and compensate.
Conroy blends humor and morbidity in this to some extent autobiographical look at growing up as a marine kid in the South.
I prefer Ordinary People when it comes to dysfunction, and A Walk To Remember when it comes to southern coming of age but this is still a excellent and thought provoking read.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Years ago I read PRINCE OF TIDES and have permanently rated it as one of my favorite books. But I never got around to reading another Pat Conroy work until my son, who is in the Marines, gave me a copy of THE GREAT SANTINI.
Written in 1976 but set in the American South on the early 1960’s it describes a hard drinking brutal side of the Marine Corp air division, that is hopefully a thing of the past. With current pilots limited on their consumption of alcohol prior to flying and an entirely different attitude about drinking in the contemporary world, the descriptios of the binge drinking by Bull Meechum and his pilots was alarming and regularly disgusting. The cruelty among the Marines and the crude insults and language among them were not comical to me, but I’m judging them from a 21st century female perspective.
The descriptions of the spousal and child abuse by Bull were hopefully a thing of the past, along with the horrible racial sterotypes and racial abuse. We can only hope and pray that that generation of Americans no longer exist.
If Ben Meechum were a real person, he would be in his early 60’s as would his sister Mary Ann. Did Ben go in to the Marine Corp? One wonders what happened to Lillian Meechum after Bull’s death and Karen and Matt. Was Lillian ever able to regain her own self respect and identity. Throughout the book I wondered how she ever stayed with this abusive and crude man who abused her and her children, but considered in the context of the time, maybe she did not have a choice.
The Meechums were a really disfunctional family tree. One want to speculate on how this effected the Meechum children and their children.
It’s a excellent read, but hopefully a part of America that no longer exist.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
He died of oxygen deficiency the same way a 1956 Graduate of The Citadel Frederick G. Schenkel, My cousin, Died in a 1962 F-4 Phantom manufacturing accident off the coast of South Carolina.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5