The unexamined questions and issues in Taylor's Summons to Memphis

In the end, Peter Taylor's final novel A Summons to Memphis (1986) is one of those unusual first-person narratives in which we, the readers, are far more knowledgeable than the narrator - not that he's an "unreliable narrator," as his detailed reports about his on-going family crisis are recounted with what seems to be complete veracity, but there's so much the narrator (Phillip Carver) misses. Phillip is in his late 40s, living in Manhattan with his long-term partner, a Jewish woman from Cleveland, and working in publishing and in rare books. He's "summoned" to his home town by his older sisters who want or need his intervention as their 80ish widowed father has announced that he plans to marry. There's actually not "a" summons but several over the course of the novel. The upshot is that the bride-to-be leaves Father at the altar, so to speak, sending him a note via the minister that she's leaving town indefinitely. Over the course of the novel, Phillip goes into great detail about the family history: His father (George) was betrayed by a business partner (Shackelford) in Nashville, so shaming George that he uprooted the family, moved to Memphis, and established anew his legal practice. For Phillip in particular this relocation was traumatic (he was about 13 years old at the time). Other traumas followed, most notably when Phillip falls in love in his 20s and through some intervention of his father the planned marriage was scrapped and the woman's family shipped her off to Brazil. So let's look at what we know and Phillip does not: First, his father was a complete tyrant, ruining the lives of each of his children (none of whom marry). Yet Phillip, encouraged by his partner (Holly) determines to "forget" his father's malicious interventions, though he's unable to "forgive." Well, forget like hell - this is trauma that has paralyzed him for life. (Interestingly, Patrick Conroy wrote about a similar theme at virtually the same time: Southern man through conversations w/ his Jewish therapist soon to be wife comes to terms with his memories of his domineering father.) And there are many unanswered questions, such as: Why has he never met anyone in Holly's family, nor she in his? What could his father possibly have said to get a family to ship their daughter to Brazil in order to avoid marriage to his son? What makes Phillip so sure that his sisters paid a secret visit to the same family in order to try to over-rule the father's dicta? How does the father so readily reconcile with his lifelong enemy? What's behind his father's weird attraction to Phillip's best friend from youth, Alex? How does Phillip never seem to recognize that Alex is living on a shoe string and that his life is entirely different from Phillip's? In short, there are many things that Phillip leaves out of his narration, though we can see the significance of these unanswered questions or un-examined avenues - as he devotes a great deal of his narrative in explaining the subtle (and ultimately pointless) differences between Memphis and Nashville customs. It's a strange novel for sure, but there's much more doing on "behind the scenes" so to speak than on the surface.