Tamara Agha-Jaffar's Reviews > A Summons to Memphis

A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor opens when forty-nine-year-old Philip Carver, living in Manhattan, receives phone calls from each of his two-middle-aged, unmarried sisters urgently summoning him home to Memphis. Their eighty-one-year-old father has decided to re-marry and Philip’s presence is required to prevent their father from making what his daughters consider a fatal mistake. Philip decides to fly to Memphis although he is unsure of what to do when he gets there.

The novel unfolds in the first-person voice of Philip, the youngest son of an upper-class Tennessee family. His narrative alternates between flashbacks and the present. The focal point of the flashbacks is Philip’s father, George Carver. A successful lawyer with an admirable sense of style, George uproots his family from Nashville to Memphis after he is almost ruined financially by his friend and business associate. The move traumatizes the family, especially the children. Philip’s brother, George Jr., enlists and is killed in World War II. His mother becomes an invalid, seldom emerging from bed before her death. Betsy and Josephine, his two sisters, never marry thanks to their father’s rejection of all their suitors. And after his father sabotages Philip’s own attempt to wed the love of his life, Philip gets as far away from his family as he can by moving to Manhattan.

Philip’s rotating timelines are his attempt to understand his past and his relationship with his father. Through letters from his sisters and his best friend, he is informed about his father’s current activities. He is summoned to Memphis twice by his sisters—once to prevent their father’s marriage and another time to thwart his reunion with his former friend. Gradually, Philip comes to realize his sisters are stunted in their development and consumed with spite and resentment toward their father. They inflict a fierce vengeance on him. They embarrass him through their behavior and manner of dressing, ridicule him publicly, prevent his marriage, and curtail his movements. This is all done with the pretext of caring for him. Philip observes this, but rather than confronting either his sisters or his father, he abandons them and catches the flight back to Manhattan.

The novel explores familial relationships and the alienation adults may feel from their family and the culture they were raised in but have since outgrown. Now a middle-aged man, Philip struggles to understand the impact their domineering father has had on his life and the lives of his sisters. His feelings toward his father are conflicted, fluctuating between feelings of abandonment, long-buried resentment, hostility, admiration, and respect. Through regular phone calls just before his father’s death, Philip succeeds in forging a reconciliation of sorts.

Ultimately, however, Philip’s versions of what happened and the impact it has had on him and his family is riddled with contradictions and speculation. The irony is that even though he thinks he has distanced himself from his past, he is trapped in it. His process to make sense of the past is not entirely satisfactory. Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps no matter how many times Philip—or we—circle around past events, we can never truly understand our parents, their choices, or the extent of their influence on our choices and lifestyles. Perhaps, like Philip Carver, the most we can hope for is some modicum of acceptance and reconciliation.

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