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Summons to Memphis is a complex tale of self-discovery by a man who has avoided such a journey for far too long. With a Jamesian like eye for detail, Peter Taylor captures the manners, traditions and philosophy of the Carver family, a family of the old South, and the internal conflicts of Phillip Carver.

The story has it’s moments, though few.  Phillip Carver, a rare book collector who lives in Manhattan with a woman much younger than he, receives a phone call from each of his two sisters insisting that he catch the next flight out of New York to Memphis.  They tell him that their father needs him– that dear old dad is about to make a fool of himself by remarrying a woman far younger than he.  Though he behaves as though he doesn’t want to go, it takes very little to get him on a plane.  He cannot resist.

Josephine and Betty, the Carver sisters, are successful businesswomen, who made their way in real estate and never married.  Now in their fifties, they still talk of the prospects for marriage in the same way they did as young debutants.  Beyond this, there is little we really know about the sisters, and even less we know about their father.  The narrator, Phillip, is the reason for the distance. His between the reader and the characters  stand-offish attitude and years of resentment toward his father’s long-ago decision to move the family from Nashville to Memphis while he was still in his youth continues to haunt him.

Taylor, a master of the short story, uses many of the same techniques for his novel that have proven so brilliant in the short story genre.  The result however, is far less than one might expect in his more well-known genre.  Little happens except for an awakening within Phillip Carver, and our image of the Carver family is always unclear. The story is dull at best despite the author’s ear for  deep, rhythmic pace and beautiful prose.  Still, the novel is rich with the ways and thinking of southerners from a time gone by and the Carver family, like all families, has some entertaining moments when least expected.