A novel behind its rightful time: The excellence of Peter Taylor's A Summons to Memphis

As I continue during this shut-in to read novels that I remember as being great and that I haven't looked back on for at least 10 years, I've been (re)reading Peter Taylor's (last) novel, A Summons to Memphis. This novel won a Pulitzer fiction prize in 1986 and many other honors and brought deserved attention to Taylor, best known as a writer of short stories, late in his career. Looking back, this novel stands up well over time - but 1986? This novel feels like 1946, or maybe 1846; the pace is slow and elegant and ruminative and very much in the Southern tradition of the first half of the 20th century, a time when Southern writing, all under the shadow of Faulkner and RP Warren, was conservative in style (this goes for Southern poetry as well) and deeply concerned with class and racial distinctions (note that O'Connor and Welty do not fit this "conservative" mode, as least in regard to the conventions of formal style). A Summons moves along like a wide, deep tidal river, moving about in time and slowly building its meandering plot into a whole. This novel is a first-person narration - the narrator being Phillip Carver, a late-40s books editor and rare-book dealer in New York, who receives a surprising call from his older sister telling him that their widowed father is planning to marry a woman in what the sister(s) think will be a disastrous match; he's "called" to their home in Memphis to put things aright. Over the course of this reflective narration, we perceive and gradually come to comprehend that the father, a conservative and respected Memphis lawyer, was a family tyrant who ruined the chances of his 2 daughters and Phillip to find love and happiness in marriage (none ever marries); a 4th sibling died in battle in WWII, with Phillip noting that he was troubled throughout his life. I'm about halfway through the story and so far have no specific information about why the father intervened in the narrator's engagement, secretly and privately, so much so that Phillip's fiancee was shipped off to Brazil and they never saw each other again. What kind of mad man would do this, and what could he have said about the impending marriage to lead to such drastic action. This, we don't yet know. The narrator, in his languid fashion, gives us a lot of information, seemingly extraneous but probably not so, about the differing styles and mores of Memphis and the initial family home in Nashville - a home they abandoned when his father was betrayed in a business deal by a man he thought was his best friend. So there's a lot going on in this short novel - does it at times read like a short story run amok? - but throughout we feel we're in the hands a hugely talented and insightful writer and that the loose ends come together and the plot, in its conventional and formal fashion, will lead to revelation and knowledge, if not love and happiness.