Prince of Tides

I guess that is the book you were reading for your book club. I read it in my Southern Writers' class. I liked it better than the movie, but there were parts that strained believability-like the thing with the tiger in the cage. In the movie, the older brother shot the escaped convicts with a gun. In the book, he pushed this tiger in a cage up to the door and sprung it on them.

My theory was that everyone in the family was nuts and, due to the sexual and emotional abuse-even the narrator/brother. So, even though he was the "well-adjusted" one, his memory was clouded by the trauma of being raped. Therefore, much of the story he was told was filled with a mixture of fact with delusion. My understanding is that a child who has suffered such abuse often surpresses the memory and it resurfaces as metaphor. So the narrator/brother isn't especially reliable as a source of information.

I'm not sure that my professor bought my argument. But it was a good class.