South of Broad, Pat Conroy’s first stab at long-form fiction in 14 years, is a sometimes gangly, other times bloated epic about a group of teens who meet in the blueblood streets of Charleston and remain unlikely friends into adulthood. It bounces between 1969 and 1989 and weighs in at 514 pages, though it seems longer.

On his A-game, of course, the reigning king of melodramatic beach reads can weave tight plots and create memorable characters that shine through even the clunkiest prose. Conroy understands that in popular fiction drama trumps style and that awkward dialogue is as easy to overlook as the occasional overwrought metaphor. His fans, for their part, know what to expect before they even crack the spine.

When boat sails on Charleston Harbor float “limp in the breathless air like butterflies trapped in a strange, city-spawned amber formed by buttermilk and ivory,” some readers groan, but others lap it up. And if the narrator describes feeling “like a booger in a Kleenex” as he enters the yacht club, not everyone cringes.

But even popular fiction has its breaking point, and South of Broad breaks almost immediately — with the introduction of heroic narrator Leopold Bloom King. The do-gooder son of a onetime Catholic nun-turned-James Joyce scholar-turned-high school principal, Leo is named after the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book Leo finds “unreadable,” but which Conroy milks for superficial lit cred. Hardcore Joyce fans who read South of Broad shouldn’t be surprised when Leo falls for gal-pal Molly.

Maybe it’s snarky to play up the gulf between Joyce and Conroy, but doing so highlights the novel’s fundamental flaw. At nearly every point, Conroy is either trying too hard or not hard enough. If he isn’t reveling in one-dimensional Joyce allusions, he’s bending history to his advantage and cribbing scenarios from mainstream cinema. That’s right. Conroy even flubs the plot.

Initially, Leo is a friendless paperboy who has spent his youth in mental wards following the suicide of his older brother, and then on probation, following a drug bust in which he took the heat for a popular classmate. His closest acquaintance is the grumpy owner of an antique store, where — for reasons only explained by Conroy’s subsequent need to justify a windfall inheritance — Leo serves out his court-ordered community service.

The summer before his senior year, however, Leo befriends a motley assortment of teen aristocrats, athletes, bohemians and orphans who together confront the anxiety of desegregation (mostly on the gridiron, as in the football flick Remember the Titans) while completely ignoring the contemporaneous reality of the Vietnam War. In South of Broad, Citadel-bound warriors don’t dream of enlisting, and lower-class kids, be they black or white, have never heard of the draft. Meanwhile, getting caught with a pound of cocaine gets you 100 hours of hard labor dusting antiques.

Obviously, the rules of fiction are flexible. Obviously, too, this book is a wreck. And when Conroy finally gets to 1989, look out. The drama-fueled baby boomer reunion may echo The Big Chill, but it reads a great deal worse.

Leo is now a gossip columnist with an estranged wife, and his gang includes world-famous actress Sheba Poe, as well as Charleston’s first black police chief, a lecherous Broad Street attorney, a teacher and a trio of cheerleading wives, one of whom, Molly, has a thing for Leo. As if to counter the highbrow silliness of the Joycean tryst, Conroy throws in a meaningless nod to network TV — marrying a former orphan named Niles to a blueblood named Fraser.

The last member of the troupe is Sheba’s flamboyantly homosexual brother Trevor, whose battle with AIDS in San Francisco leads to his kidnapping, which occasions a group road trip to rescue him and meantime do a little community service in the Tenderloin. With the help of a former NFL linebacker-turned-homeless-mugger, whom the men recognize on the street as an old high school adversary — and despite a run-in with a master of disguises who has stalked Sheba since childhood — the gang eventually …

Oh, never mind. If you make it to the part when they’re back in Charleston and Hurricane Hugo blows ashore, you might enjoy a bit more of Conroy’s famously purple prose. Just be sure to close the book before they rescue the beached dolphin or unearth Trevor’s vintage porn collection. After that, things get ridiculous.