ARTS FAIR

Alice Munro's latest collection has the soft blue hold of faded jeans.

JAMES WOLCOTT

Conroy's Good Tiding

'The story of my family was the story of salt water, of boats and shrimp, of tears and storm"—thus Tom Wingo, the word-happy narrator of Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides (Houghton Mifflin). Throw in a pet tiger, a mysterious white porpoise, and more murder and mayhem than in all of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor combined, and you get a glimmer of what's going on in this novel. Ostensibly the story of a redneck family of South Carolina shrimpers after W.W. II, Tides is really an old-fashioned saga about old-fashioned themes: honor, pride, loyalty. A good part of the novel is set in New York, where Tom has a romance with his crazy poet sister's psychiatrist, but it's when he's writing about the South, of mossy trees and old plantations in the moonlight, that Conroy rises to bonechilling eloquence. Out on his father's boat, Tom broods: "A music played through the vibrating timbers of the boat's wood frame and the river was panthercolored before dawn and it sang to the town in soft canticles of those tides that bore us gloriously out toward the breakers beyond the most beautiful sea islands in the world." There are 567 pages of this high-flown prose and you wish it would never end.

Conroy's books (The Great Santini and The Water Is Wide) have made him a name, but he's never enjoyed the literary reputation he deserves. In his speech at the last meeting of the A.B.A., Conroy complained, "Now I have grown very tired of being a literary wee-wee." You ain't no wee-wee, boy. You're in the Big Time now.

JAMES ATLAS