Beach Music

“The telegram had opened up an old family wound that I had long forgotten. I did not know how to begin to explain to either Ledare or my daughter the scenes from my life with my mother where she had used the imminence of her own demise.”

In keeping with the theme of The Potency of Generational Trauma, Lucy’s childhood experiences of abuse and neglect are reflected in her flaws as a parent—she raises Jack and his brothers without having had an example of functional family life. Lucy’s sons often reference Lucy’s mercurial and manipulative nature; when Jack receives a telegram stating that his mother is sick, he doesn’t trust it at first, thinking she must be playing a trick to convince him to come home.

“I was breaking a solemn vow I had made after Shyla had leapt from a bridge in Charleston. I was going home.”

Jack decides to visit South Carolina after being away for five years. He is motivated by love and concern for Lucy, who has leukemia. While Shyla’s death had profound impact on her husband and community, as the grief of her loss and the painful aftermath drove Jack to move to Rome with Leah, never planning to return, the pull of home proves stronger than he can resist.

“My mother carried an ache inside her always that I am sure the birth of a daughter would have done much to alleviate. We had made her life boy-haunted, son-possessed.”

Parent-child relationships are a central focus of Beach Music. As Jack reflects on his mother’s illness and makes plans to visit her, he considers the sacrifices that Lucy has made for her children and ponders the fact that the emotional needs of parents often go unmet. Jack’s relationship with his mother evolves over the course of the novel as they learn to confide in each other and forgive each other for past hurts.

“‘Lucky me,’ I said. ‘Funny about Mom. I think I’ve been mad at her my whole life, yet I adore her. I can’t bear to think of her hurting or in trouble.’”

Jack returns home to South Carolina, and begins to contend with the concept of Forgiveness as Difficult but Necessary Work. This early in the novel, he has not forgiven his mother yet, but is beginning to realize that he wants to—that her well-being and her happiness are important to him and that he wants her in his life.

“On its own, my spirit seemed to relax, like a folding chair let out by a pool. Because even beauty has its limits, I shall always remain a prisoner of war to this fragrant, voluptuous latitude of the planet.”

Setting has a powerful presence in the novel, especially the setting of South Carolina’s low country. Using a mixture of concrete imagery and poetic and dramatic language, Jack considers how it feels to be back home in South Carolina. Here, the homey comparison of Jack’s spirit to a pool lounge chair is juxtaposed with the sweeping lyricism of his description of the landscape as “this fragrant, voluptuous latitude”—a phrase loaded with sensuousness. This quote illustrates the conflicting emotions that Jack feels about his home; he feels relaxed by and in awe of his home’s beauty while also feeling that it holds him prisoner.

“No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.”

The opening lines of Chapter 10 show the philosophical musings that Conroy uses to introduce most of the chapters. These chapter openers give the reader access to Jack’s thoughts, providing a clear picture of his world view. Here, Jack reflects on the confusion and disorientation that he and his brothers feel as their mother is dying.

“She was standing in the exact same spot where Shyla used to stand throwing me kisses that had once sweetened the whole world for me. Ruth waved to me, a gesture of sadness and silence. I nodded. All I could manage was a nod and I thought it would kill me.”

Jack is overwhelmed upon returning home to South Carolina and revisiting places where he spent time with Shyla. Shyla’s mother longs to speak with Jack, but he is not ready to forgive her. That he finds it so painful to even nod to her reinforces the theme of Forgiveness as Difficult but Necessary Work.

“Though I had differences of opinion with almost everyone in the room and though dissonance was what my family did best, there was an inalienable beauty and affirmation in this drawing together and it moved me. Five years ago I had declared myself a man without a family. Now, I could not decide if that was a cardinal sin or merely wishful thinking.”

Jack experiences substantial character growth over the course of the novel. A cornerstone of that transformation is the realization that he has done himself more harm than good by cutting himself off from his family.

“Closing my eyes, I did not think I could bear one more confrontation or ghost from my complicated past. I especially had no desire to exchange harsh words with the mother of the woman I had most adored. I thought of Leah in Rome and how much I missed her. How much more had Ruth Fox suffered, I thought, by losing both Shyla and Leah in the space of a single year?”

Ruth Fox is one of the first people from his past who Jack decides to forgive. It is his empathy for Ruth as a parent that motivates Jack to hear what she has to say. Jack’s fatigue in this passage emphasizes how hard it is for him to offer forgiveness. This is one of Jack’s relatable character flaws.

“Ruth Fox looked at me. ‘Jack, you know nothing of despair.’ I leaned toward her and whispered fiercely, ‘I’ve got a working acquaintance with it.’ ‘You know nothing of it. You know its edges. I know its heart,’ Ruth said firmly, quietly, and convincingly.”

In Chapter 16, Ruth tells Jack her life story. This kind of embedded tale is a narrative device that Conroy uses repeatedly to fill in the backstories of important characters. Ruth and Jack compare their pain—a motif that repeats throughout the novel, with characters longing for others to recognize their trauma. The depth of Ruth’s pain reinforces the theme of The Potency of Generational Trauma, as her fear and despair are passed down to Shyla.

“Tomorrow, I would return home, tell Leah everything I saw and heard and felt, then trust her openhearted, hungering, and motherless spirit to forgive me. I had taken her away from what we both were. I had given her everything except the South.”

In visiting South Carolina, Jack sees the community and companionship that he has denied his daughter by keeping her isolated from their family and her ethnic heritage. This introduces a major turning point for Jack; in Part 3 he will bring Leah home to South Carolina.

“Going back to see my stricken mother, it never occurred to me that I would encounter my lost self waiting for me at her bedside.”

Jack does not truly feel like himself until he is back at home in South Carolina, and until he forces himself to contend with his past and reconcile himself to it. The concept that a person’s sense of identity is tied to home is a powerful throughline in the novel.

“‘Semper Fidelis,’ the general whispered. ‘They’re the two strongest words in my heart. They just are. Nothing else explains today. The loss of my wife. My son. Semper Fidelis.’”

"Semper Fidelis” is Latin for “always faithful,” and it is the motto of the US Marine Corps. By repeating them here, the general shows the degree to which he has internalized this call to loyalty and duty—the phrase now forms the core of his identity. The general’s dedication to the Marines, at the cost of his family, highlights The Line Between Duty and Loyalty and is an important factor in subplot involving Jordan and his crime.

“We came out of that summer with our friendship sealed. But the story of our friendship would bear bitter fruit and would one day bring tears to the eyes of all those who loved us well.”

This passage, at the ending of Chapter 21, foreshadows Capers’s eventual betrayal of his friends. That foreshadowing is woven throughout Chapter 21, as Capers is threatened by Jordan, even while the two develop affection for each other. Jordan is not a Southerner in the way the others are, and Capers and Jordan clash because Capers feels a deep duty toward his Southern identity.

“By walking the beach each morning, Lucy had strengthened her belief in God and come to understand that she was no more important to the planet thank the smallest plankton that floated in the invisible broth that served the softest orders of the food chain. It had helped Lucy when she could think of her own bloodstream as an island sea not much different from the one that she and Leah walked beside.”

The ocean plays an important role in Beach Music, especially for Lucy’s character. Lucy’s connection with the ocean, and with the sea turtles, reinforces her ties to her home and her sense of independence and identity. Spending time on the beach is the primary way that Leah and Lucy bond in the little time that they have together.

“When she rushed into them and buried her head in his great chest, the town roared out its greeting to her. It let her know that she was part of Waterford, South Carolina, from that day forward, that she had found her home.”

This scene describes Ruth arriving in Waterford, having been rescued from Nazi-occupied Poland by Max Rusoff. This passage reinforces the concept of home as the place where a person belongs and feels loved, an important concept throughout the novel.

“My child held me as the song her mother and I had loved best in the world completely undid me. I could bear the memory, but I couldn’t bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.”

This scene is a powerful instance of the recurring motif of beach music. Here, after Leah and Jack dance to “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Jack cries because he finally feels fully in touch with his grief and love for Shyla. Beach music is representative of South Carolina culture, and of Jack’s past with Shyla.

“Many times, she felt as closely watched as a prisoner on parole for good behavior. She did not mind being noticed, but resented being studied. The town made her far more aware of being motherless that Rome ever had.”

Here, Jack reflects on Leah’s experience of returning to South Carolina to become reacquainted with their family. In some ways, Leah’s experience of being observed echoes the anxiety-filled childhood of her mother, who grew up with oppressively protective parents deeply scarred by the Holocaust. This passage is indicative of the conflicted, complicated relationship that the characters have with their pasts, reinforcing The Potency of Generational Trauma, as Leah must live with the awareness that Shyla’s death makes her stand out while also not knowing much about the Jewish side of her family.

“It was not merely foreignness that set their house apart, but a sadness so profound that it settled like a killing dust in every square inch of those immaculate, spacious rooms.”

Jack recalls his childhood impressions of Shyla’s family home, where Ruth and George’s lingering grief and trauma were a constant presence. The Fox’s home environment is the most powerful example of The Potency of Generational Trauma in the novel.

“I thought silence was the proper resolution and strategy for what had happened to me. I did not think my poisons and hatreds and shame would leak out and poison everything I loved.”

In Chapter 30, George Fox tells his story to Jack. Here, he confesses that secrecy and silence have been his approach to his past. He has come to regret that approach; he realizes that in attempting to protect his family from his traumatic experiences, he instead left them all to deal with the effects in solitude and confusion.

“The Class of 1966 was entering an America that was newly hallucinatory and disfigured. The whole country seemed to have turned inward upon itself and all the old certainties seemed marginal and hollow, and that tangy confidence of a nation accustomed to strutting turned hesitant almost overnight.”

Jack reflects on the social and political climate of the ’60s and ’70s, when he and his friends graduated high school and entered college. The Vietnam War, and the antiwar movement, escalated while they are in school. The question of The Line Between Loyalty and Duty was in the public spotlight at the time, and this thematic issue is at the heart of the conflict that arises between Jack and his friends.

“It also made enemies of the closest group of friends I had ever known. We accidentally let ourselves be caught up in the zeitgeist and we were never the same again, any of us.”

At this point, the reader still does not know what events led to the conflict between Jack and his friends. These lines of foreshadowing come at the opening of Chapter 35, when the mock trial at the Dock Street Theater begins. The author uses Jack’s dramatic, perhaps hyperbolic, narrative voice to embody the high-octane emotions that they all felt during their college years.

“Somewhere in this story I found myself missing in action in a tale of my own life. I waited for a summing up, a gathering of all the disparate and contradicting parts, a voice from the past to grant benediction for a life I did not even realize I was leading.”

Jack longs for “benediction,” or spiritual blessing, and for forgiveness. In the culmination of his personal journey, Jack realizes that he needs to forgive not only others but also himself for the mistakes he’s made. This is the final evolution of the theme of Forgiveness as Difficult but Necessary Work.