When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Em’s a star, but she can’t support a whole novel.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The family lives in Bombay in a miserably cramped apartment, though the Big Hoom makes good money as a salesman their social class and ethnicity are left fuzzy. Flashbacks to the couple’s life before Em’s breakdown are poorly integrated. Pinto could also have provided more context.

Even the son gets short shrift as the schoolboy, presto changeo, becomes a journalist. The latter is the perfect foil to Em: The straight man, stiff upper lip, solid as a rock but dull Em has sucked up all the oxygen. Their conversations are the heart of the novel. He has his reasons his greatest fear is that he’ll inherit her madness. Rather than mother and son, they are two equals sparring, the son interrogating her with a prosecutor’s sharpness. “A rough, rude, roistering woman,” says her son. When Em is in a manic phase, her conversation is wild, raunchy, funny and malicious as she free-associates.

The second one was especially rough on the kids they discovered her in the bathroom, swimming in blood.

How did it all begin? She was fine giving birth to his big sister, Susan, but after the boy, postpartum depression ballooned into manic-depressive disorder, with a streak of paranoia. (The childhood names have stuck.) Em is in the hospital every few months. The unnamed narrator, in his late teens, is visiting his mother, Em his father, unaccountably, is the Big Hoom. But what if she’s mad? That’s the reality facing a teenage son in this mordant debut about a troubled Indian family.

Big hoom