A Summons to Memphis is a 1986 novel by Peter Taylor.
It is set in the early 1970s. The narrator, Phillip Carver, is a 49-year-old man who one day gets phone calls from his older sisters, Betsy and Josephine. Their father, George Carver, who has been a widower for a couple of years, is talking about getting married to a younger woman. Betsy and Josephine, desperate to stop this, call Phillip from his home in New York back to Memphis to help. The call leads Phillip to ruminate on his family's history, and how nothing was the same for them after George was defrauded in a business deal in 1931 and as a consequence had to move the family from Nashville to Memphis.
One of only three novels by Peter Taylor, who spent most of his career writing short stories.
Tropes:
- Age-Inappropriate Dress: Phillip's sisters are pushing 60 but, to his mortification, still dress like young women. He writes about how they dress in miniskirts or Sexy Backless Outfits or show Absolute Cleavage, long after they've grown fat and saggy.
- Call-Back: Long ago, Phillip's old girlfriend Clara gave him a golden four-leaf clover pendant. At the end Phillip gives the pendant to Holly, signaling that he's going to commit to her for real.
- Character Narrator: Phillip. The whole novel is basically a story told by him, with almost no dialogue, but only Phillip and his memories of his own life.
- Control Freak: It's not immediately obvious why, but for whatever reason, after the family moves to Memphis, George Carver starts exerting total control over the lives of his children. He forbids either of his daughters from marrying their boyfriends, and in fact they never do get married. Later, Phillip fell in love with a girl from Chattanooga named Clara, only for his father, again for no obvious reason, to intervene and stop that marriage too. Phillip's older brother, also named George, volunteers to serve in World War II but has to lie to his father that he got drafted. And Phillip himself only got out of Memphis and went off to an academic career in New York because his sisters loaned him money and snuck him out of town.
- Death by Childbirth: In the backstory. Phillip relates that his father's mother died within an hour of giving birth to George.
- Flashback: Large portions of the novel are this, as the call from Memphis gets Phillip thinking about his family and his past. One long section describes the traumatic move from Nashville to Memphis, and how, for reasons that remain unclear, the delay that Betsy and her boyfriend had in following led to Mr. Carver forbidding the marriage.
- The first two-thirds of the novel is effectively nothing but flashbacks, as Phillip thinks about his family and his life. Finally the present-day Parent With A New Paramour is dealt with in the final third.
- Historical Domain Character: Phillip randomly mentions meeting Gertrude Stein when he was stationed in Paris during World War II.
- Old Maid: Both Phillip's sisters, who, after their father ruins their youthful romances, never do marry. Phillip suspects that they're both still virgins.
- Parent with New Paramour: Betsy and Josephine are not happy when their 82-year-old father gets engaged to a schoolteacher named Clara Stockwell who is much younger than him. They take action to stop the marriage.
- Posthumous Character:
- George Carver's wife Minta, who had a mild nervous breakdown of sorts after the relocation to Memphis and eventually stopped leaving the house. She has been dead two years as of the setting of the main story.
- Phillip's brother, George Jr., who regarded his father with something approaching contempt. George went off to join the Army in World War II, and was shot down and killed over France on D-Day.
- Revenge: Phillip uses the words "revenge" and "vengeance" more than once in regards to his sisters. It seems that Betsy and Josephine wrecked their father's prospective marriage to a younger woman, not because of any concern of a Gold Digger, but out of sheer spite after their father for whatever reason destroyed their marriage chances decades before.
- Serious Business: Moving from Nashville to Memphis. Phillip observes that how to an outsider there would be no discernible difference between Nashville and Memphis. However, to people who lived there, there most certainly was a difference, with Nashville being the home of Old Money and genteel antebellum-style Southern manners, while Memphis was a bustling place of commerce. It was serious business for the Carver family anyway, as Betsy and Josephine's budding romances were both destroyed and George's wife Minta was never quite the same again.
- Stealing from the Till: George's business partner Lewis Shackleford embezzled from the investment business he ran with George. This cost George a lot of money and led to the whole family moving to Memphis.
- What Did I Do Last Night?: Phillip remembers one of his Army buddies, who woke up in his barracks room after a night of heavy drinking, saw a strange woman using his mirror to comb her hair, and realized that he got married overnight.
