Plot
Tom Wingo is a middle-aged man with a wife and three young daughters who has recently lost his job as a high school English teacher and football coach. He learns that his twin sister, Savannah, has attempted suicide yet again. Starting in her childhood, Savannah experienced visual and aural hallucinations involving bloody figures and dogs which tell her to kill herself. Savannah moves to New York City and becomes an emerging writer of poetry, writing about her past as a way to escape from it. After many years, Savannah attempts suicide and nearly dies, the hallucinations still haunting her. Tom agrees to go to New York to look after his sister until she is well again. Before he leaves his home in South Carolina, he learns that Sallie, his wife, is having an affair. He is not completely surprised as he has not been very affectionate toward her.
In New York, Tom stays at Savannah’s apartment, as she is in the hospital. He meets with her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein, and agrees to stay in the city until he has filled Susan in on the dysfunctional childhood he and Savannah shared. Susan does not think it is a good idea for Tom to visit Savannah for a while since contact with any of her family greatly disturbs her.
Susan and Tom grow close during all the time they spend together talking about Savannah. They are very different people: Susan is a wealthy Jewish psychiatrist who lives in New York City and Tom is a Catholic teacher who grew up poor in rural Colleton County, South Carolina. They often butt heads, but they develop a relationship of mutual comfort and respect. Susan tells Tom about her shaky marriage to Herbert Woodruff, a famous concert violinist, and her husband’s affair with another woman. Tom and Susan spend a lot of time together socially as well as professionally. He also agrees to coach Susan’s difficult teenaged son, Bernard, in football.
Tom recounts his sad and horrific childhood for Susan in hopes that it might help her save Savannah. We learn that Tom and his siblings, twin sister Savannah and their elder brother, Luke, were the offspring of an abusive father and uncaring mother. Their father, Henry, a WWII bomber crewman who survived being shot down and managed to evade capture by the Nazis, thought that the best way to raise a family was by beating them, and did so regularly. He was a shrimp boat operator and, despite being successful at that profession, spent all of his money on frivolous business pursuits. One business attempt was a gas station that he advertised with a live tiger, which became the family pet, Caesar. These attempts leave the family in poverty. Their overly proud, status-hungry mother, Lila, was only concerned about the family's public image and would not let her children say a word about their father's abuse.
Eventually, Tom reveals the most traumatic event of their childhood, which ultimately caused the first of several of Savannah's suicide attempts. A man the children nickname "Callanwolde,” whom they first encounter in the woods next to their grandmother's home in Atlanta, later escapes from prison with two other men and goes to the Wingo home on Melrose Island, South Carolina when the twins were 18. They rape Tom, Savannah, and Lila. Luke, who was working outside, comes to the house, sees the men through the window, and releases Caesar, who kills the men raping Lila and Savannah. Meanwhile, Tom kills the man who raped him. Lila and the children dispose of the men's bodies and she makes them promise that they will never tell a soul about what happened.
After the revelation of the rape, Susan feels that she is even closer to helping Savannah. Tom says the worst thing that happened to their family was Luke’s death. This is the incident that caused Tom to have a nervous breakdown and lose his job. He then tells the story of how Luke died. Lila ends up divorcing Henry many years later, and marries Reese Newbury, a prominent landowner in the city of Colleton and the father of Tom's childhood rival. Lila had gained Melrose Island in the divorce settlement, and sells it to Newbury, who in turn sells it to the Atomic Energy Commission, who are beginning construction of production plants there. Luke, an ex-Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam, decides to fight for his land and the city by using guerrilla tactics to destroy bridges and building equipment, leading him to become a wanted man. An FBI agent approaches Tom and asks him to offer Luke a deal of only three to five years in prison in exchange for his cease-fire. Both Savannah and Tom track down Luke, and they try to persuade him to give up instead of being killed by the FBI. Luke agrees to the deal, but on his way to the rendezvous point to surrender, he is shot and killed by a soldier who did not know about the agreement. Luke's death was the driving force behind Savannah's latest suicide attempt, and Susan and Tom figure out that in order to save Savannah, she would have to write poetry about Luke's life the way she wrote about her childhood.
Tom and Susan begin an affair, but Tom realizes that he still loves Sallie. During his time in the city, he becomes a new man. He falls in love with life again and owes much of his transformation to Susan. After saving Savannah, Tom and Susan part ways and he returns to his family in South Carolina, reconciling with Sallie. He becomes much closer to his wife and daughters as a result of his time in New York. We later learn that Susan ends up divorcing Herbert and is now dating a lawyer. Meanwhile, Savannah recovers from her suicide attempt, and she and Tom become closer to each other. Henry, after being released from prison for drug trafficking, is confronted by Tom about his abuse. He claims to not remember ever hurting his family. Although Savannah and Tom can never completely forgive Henry for the damage that he did, they look forward to getting to know their father better, who acts like a changed man. Despite an earlier apologetic conversation between Lila and Tom, he and Savannah have not completely repaired their relationship with their mother. At the novel’s conclusion, it appears that despite all that has happened, everyone will be all right.
