James Conaway knew there was something wrong with his father before he let himself think about it. The signs were there, in unfocused phone calls and cryptic letters, but for a time they could be ignored. Finally, on a reporting trip to Memphis, his hometown, Conaway visited his parents and faced the facts: his father was sick; he was in the early stages of what proved to be Alzheimer's disease. The dreaded illness is the inspiration for this beautifully written memoir of family and the South. As memory left his father, the author felt moved to recreate the world they had shared, to shore up as many fragments of the past as possible against oblivion.

As it happens, many of those fragments are outrageously funny. Memphis Afternoons takes us back to a 1950s society when the rules of southern gentlemanliness were still in effect, if only barely. This is a world where propriety had always fought a dubious battle with bourbon, and now was being defeated by the likes of Elvis Presley. With a rueful wit, Conaway artfully renders a youth of hunting and fishing trips, brawls, and debutante parties, of sexual and alcoholic and literary explorations. The story is told against a wistful background of another generation, his father's, told with a belated appreciation for that generation's ideals, hopes, and its diminished postwar reality. Conaway writes of the idiosyncrasies of his family life with a keen yet tender sense of the absurd, particularly of a sometimes loving, mysterious relationship with his father. Linking the generations is an antiquated but powerful code of conduct, recalled here with extraordinary vividness and humor.