Originally from Memphis, Patton, a UA graduate, is the author of four previous novels. In “Rush,” which I really enjoyed, a madly pretentious mother, at a cost of $20,000, has her freshman daughter’s dorm room decorated to help the girl into a sorority at Ole Miss. “Rush” was a satirical, comical novel, in its way a frightening novel, especially after some friends told me yes, this does happen. Well, it shouldn’t.
“Kissing the Sky” explores the consequences of a different Southern extremism, not Southern middle-class pretentiousness but abusive conservatism, and it is devoid of humor. Suzannah Withers is living with a dominating father whose rigidity strains belief. Like Colonel Don Conroy, Pat Conroy’s father, the Great Santini, he is a retired colonel, utterly controlling.
Suzannah is forced to attend Christian, conservative Union College, and at home is not allowed to smoke or drink, of course, but also there will be no rock and roll music, and absolutely no dancing. She secretly listens to rock and roll and is a gifted singer but is forbidden to sing, except at church. The colonel maintains this authority because, in Tennessee at that time, legal adulthood is 21, not 18. Why Suzannah, at 20 years old, goes along with it is mysterious. But, dad holds the purse strings.
Suzannah is, I think it is fair to say, psychologically abused. She is to attend a Beatles concert but when John Lennon suggests the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, Dad forces Suzannah to stand at the concert hall, as her friends walk by, with a sign that says “Go back to England,” “You are not welcome here,” and her records and magazines are put on a burn pile.
The colonel has also forced Ron, Suzannah’s brother, to enlist for Vietnam, insisting it will make a man of him. Suzannah runs away from home to the Woodstock music and anti-war festival, and the bulk of the novel is her reminiscing to her granddaughter at the fiftieth anniversary celebration.
Patton, who was too young to attend in 1969, has done a lot of research, perhaps too much, so the novel, in its detail, tends towards the documentary, the factually accurate, taking us dutifully through the four days, hour by hour, sometimes literally minute by minute, performance by performance, even meal by meal, through the rain and mud, the bad acid, but also the miraculous sharing and good will that was generated in this instant village of half a million young people.
We watch from the opening act, Arlo Guthrie, through Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, all the way to Jimi Hendrix and his transcendental version of the national anthem. Suzannah is liberated. She has a triumph singing in front of a large audience on the Hog Farm Stage, she takes dope, falls in love and her life is changed forever.
