FIRST-PERSON PORTENTOUS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Pat Conroy's new novel Beach Music (Doubleday; 628 pages; $27.50) jumps onto your lap like a large shaggy dog that will do anything to get your attention. It's friendly but still has teeth, like The Prince of Tides with its theme of family violence barely concealed in Southern blarney. Beach Music's Jack McCall has his own troublesome clan in South Carolina. His father the Judge is a brilliant drunk. Mom is a former striptease dancer, feisty cancer patient and savior of threatened loggerhead turtles. McCall's brothers include a hermit who lives in a tree house. Friends are also conspicuously memorable: a former beauty queen who writes film scripts, the grandson of a Jewish store owner who becomes a Hollywood big shot, and a former hippie turned Trappist monk.

Reunited in their 40s, they are a lively bunch. But Conroy, who has thrived by writing in the first-person portentous, burdens his already preoccupied characters with the bloody 20th century. Attempts to relate the madness of Vietnam to Hitler's evil are loopy. So is some of Conroy's rhetoric. "Through no preference or selection of our own," begins one chapter, "the graduating class of 1966, in high schools all over America, found ourselves cast like dice across the velvet-covered gambling tables of history ... the best we could do was cover our eyes and ears and genitalia like pangolins or armadillos and make sure that our soft underbellies were not exposed for either inspection or slaughter."

You can bet your velvet-covered pangolin that few readers will be distracted by the loose grammar and exotic similes. Conroy will simply overwhelm them with his leapfrogging plots and romantic scenery: a movie-set Rome, a travel-book Venice and the postcard-pretty South Carolina coast. Too tame? Then just wait for the women who set fire to abusive men, the attack of the giant manta ray, and the general's daughter and the private who are blown up by a war protester's bomb while making love in a parked DC-3.

Conroy's expansive storytelling style tends to disarm criticism. But he goes too far when the Holocaust bears down on Beach Music like a runaway cement barge. First, McCall's Jewish wife jumps off a bridge after having her father's concentration-camp number tattooed on her arm; she wants to join Europe's murdered Jews. Conroy later inserts long sections about pogroms in czarist Russia, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi death camps to explain the suicide. They don't. The historical carpetbagging doesn't add much of anything to the novel except a few unnecessarily grisly shocks.

Most of the major characters seem to be living in another novel. After his wife's death, McCall and his young daughter move to Italy, where he writes cookbooks and travel articles for American magazines. The job description would be more convincing if he didn't talk like a parody of artsy menu prose: "The marriage of rice and truffle exploded in silent concordat," or "the congruent personalities of the tomato and garlic with the happy green smile of basil."

But when Conroy writes about the pleasures of eating boiled crab on tables covered with yesterday's newspaper, when he celebrates the low country's amphibious charms or confronts his mixed feelings about bubba culture, there are flashes of a gifted novelist. That would be the Pat Conroy who wrote The Water Is Wide and The Great Santini, not the maker of what is certain to be this summer's best-selling snack.