A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
Published 1987 · 224 pages · 56,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Summons to Memphis to read?
A Summons to Memphis scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Southern American prose with period social vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Long, digressive sentences circling around family history.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Questions of family control and freedom through memory.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with Southern family and social history.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- Phillip's perspective limits and colors everything.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Memphis and Nashville, the father carry symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Taylor's restraint creates sustained ironic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Family patterns continue; reconciliation is complex.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Retrospective narrative with layered family history.
How A Summons to Memphis is regarded
A Summons to Memphis holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.