text: My blood was boiling as I read other customers' rave reviews of "The Prince of Tides."  Whoever considers this thesaurus-scrubbing, self-indulgent mess of cliches a literary masterpiece has no sense of language and literature.  Someone was even audacious enough to compare Pat Conroy to Virginia Woolf.  What a joke!  Woolf's writing is brilliant, original, and real.  She cuts to the quick, whereas Conroy slathers his story in cloying metaphors and trite descriptions.  One can almost see Conroy congratulating himself on each simile and metaphor as he writes, not caring how superfluous or artificial his language is -- nor how unrealistic it makes the story.  I laughed out loud at some of the words he puts in the characters' mouths.  In the real world, nobody is as self-concious and self-reflexive as the characters in this book.  They do not speak in reams of figurative language.  I cannot even get into how inconsistent and impossible the characters are, especially the children.  Also, Conroy caricatures both places and exaggerates the cultural gulf between them.  (I make that claim as a Southerner who lived in NYC for four years.)  It's one of many, many flaws in this ridiculous book.  Read it if you like sensational stories with mass appeal (John Irving, etc.), but avoid it if you have any respect for the English language and for real American literature (Cheever, Plath, Hemingway, Cather, etc.).  Don't be fooled by all the fools out there. 
  