Roxanna Slade

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Wednesday 1998

The second time I met Reynolds Price was uneventful. So was the first, at which I didn't so much meet him as stand next to him. Still, each small moment changed the way I saw myself. That second time was the first time I ever ate at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. It was also the first time I got taken to dinner by my current literary agent, whose client list includes Nobel Laureates and National Book Award winners and who, I feared, had mistaken me for someone else.

We walked into the Algonquin dining room, and there was Price, in his big, shiny wheelchair, right at the Round Table!

I nearly fainted.

My agent hugged him. He was up from North Carolina for an awards dinner.

She introduced me to him as "my new client."

Price smiled his wide, genteel southern grin. "So," he said. "A junior partner in the firm."

I have no idea what I said. Something inane, surely.

He reached up, touched me on the shoulder. "Let her pay," he stage-whispered. "She's the agent."

She laughed. So did Price.

She and I took a table nearby. Thank God. I was working on my fourth book then, no novice. And there was nothing intimidating about that warm, friendly man. But I didn't feel like I belonged at that table, with that hero of mine.

Yet, there I was, in the same restaurant. In the same profession. A junior partner in the firm. Eating a meal Reynolds Price's agent paid for.

******

This is from Roxanna Slade, Price's novel, told in the voice of a 90-something woman, in the middle of herattemptto tell the story of her life:

The problem in trying to tell the story of a human life is easy to state. People's lives...are uneventful for way over three-fourths of their length. If you don't believe (and I know I don't) that every instant in a life is urgent to that person's fate, then you could write a satisfactory life of the busiest man or woman who ever lived in less than two pages, often on a postcard. Most things that happen to a person leave no more trace than last month's raindrop....

All the same, I'm almost convinced that if you can tell the absolute truth about the five or ten moments that mattered in any one life, then you'll have shown how every life is as useful to the world and to the eyes of God as any president's or pope's.

I'm not sure anyone ever said a wiser thing about trying to tell stories that involve recognizable human lives.

Price, at 65, is a throwback to that grand, dying tradition, the man of letters: poet, short story writer, playwright, novelist, reviewer, critic, essayist, autobiographer, translator (of the Gospels), and college professor. At Duke, Price teaches not only writing workshops (where his students have included Fred Chappell, Josephine Humphreys, and Anne Tyler) but also, once a year, the Milton seminar.

Roxanna Slade is Price's 30th book, but his main character's shrewd sense of narrative has been Price's credo from the get-go, when at the age of 29 he published his first novel, A Long and Happy Life (which, speaking of the Algonquin Round Table, was called a book that "strikes too deep to fuss around with analysis" by no less than Dorothy Parker).

In trying to solve the problem of telling the stories of recognizable human lives, Price, particularly in his short fiction (see The Collected Stories), has done what any master writing teacher would tell his students to do: Skip the "way over three-fourths" of your characters' lives that are uneventful and write about the eventful, interesting parts. But what's special about Price is his ability to spin long, deceptively simple stories by telling "the absolute truth about the five or ten moments that mattered in any one life."

At times, that life was Price's own, which he's written about in two fine autobiographies, Clear Pictures and A Whole New Life. (The latter deals directly with the astrocytoma in his spinal cord that rendered him a paraplegic in 1984; since then, Price has continued to teach and has produced more than a book a year!)

More often, those lives have been ones Price invented. The love story of Rosa and Wesley Beavers, for example, begun in A Long and Happy Life and continued in Good Hearts. Or the magnificent Kate Vaiden, in which the eponymous heroine, who describes herself as "a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years," tells the story of those years, in the form of a faux autobiography. Anyone who marveled in Cold Mountain or She's Come Undone at how a male author can so convincingly write from a female perspective should enjoy seeing what a true master can do. This is the territory to which Price returns in Roxanna Slade: a woman, this one born with the century, who surveys both her own engagingly "uneventful" life and the century in which it was lived, deftly recalling societal changes along the way. Childbirth, for instance, "killed young mothers like flies, a fact that's all but forgotten today in America." There are lines like that every couple of pages; my wife politely asked me to stop reading so many aloud, because she wanted to read the book, too. I would have quoted more lines here, but she's in the next room reading and wanted the book back.

******

The first time I met Reynolds Price? The American Booksellers Association convention in Washington, D.C. His publisher was giving away copies of Clear Pictures, and Price would be signing them.

As I got close, I saw a long line. I joined it. It humbled me to see how far I had to go. But it also made me feel great about being in a profession where several hundred people gathered for someone as worthy as Price.

I drew closer. I saw a sign. I was in line for Vanna White's autobiography, Vanna Speaks. The line for Price was off to the left. Maybe 20 people long.

Price sat in that wheelchair and signed books and was charming, chatting up his modest crowd. Even among book people, Vanna White was a bigger draw than Reynolds Price. This is the kind of indignity any great American writer must suffer with grace.

If Price was suffering, he didn't show it. When I got to the front of the line, I inanely blurted that I, too, was a writer. He said some nice things to me that I was too starstruck to hear. He signed my book "With encouragement, Reynolds Price."

I've always felt like a freak, that I was so naive to have once thought people cared about real books.

Then again — nine years later, the game show second banana's book is out of print. Most of Price's rich body of work is readily available.

The absolute truth? Roxanna Slade would be a good place to start.

Mark Winegardner, a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University, is the author of four books, including, most recently, the novel The Veracruz Blues.

From the Publisher

Richard Bernstein The New York Times Reading Reynolds Price's novel Roxanna Slade is like sitting through a long and languid North Carolina evening and listening to an intimate summing up of a hard life.

Diana Postlethwaite The Washington Post Reading Roxanna Slade is like sitting at the feet of the wisest, most engaging, truth-tellingest grandmother imaginable....Here is language you can swim in, inhale, savor on the tip of your tongue.

David Weigand San Francisco Chronicle Roxanna Slade is a profoundly and provocatively hope-filled book — one might even say spiritual....Masterful...compelling.

Charles Frazier author of Cold Mountain What a privilege to sit down with this book and let Roxanna Slade's wise, strong voice talk in your mind for a measure of hours about the profound consequence of ordinary lives.

James Schiff The Raleigh News & Observer A virtuoso performance...through Roxanna's voice Price demonstrates that he, more than any of his contemporaries, is indeed a singer of stories.

Janet Burroway The New York Times Book Review A chronicler of decency, pluck and joy, in novel after novel [Price] has given us the weight and worth of the ordinary.

Ellen Kanner The Miami Herald Roxanna Slade shows that in a world of deceit, a simple, good woman is something exceptional. She can tell a good story if you have the time to listen.

Barbara Holliday Detroit Free Press Reynolds Price may well be the dean of Southern writers.

Anne Rivers Siddons Extraordinary. Price knows all there is to know about the American South, and Roxanna Slade is what he knows. It's a powerful book in its deceptive simplicity, vivid and particular. I loved it.

Polly Paddock Gossett The Charlotte Observer Price proves yet again why he is one of America's most esteemed writers. His prose is rich and lyrical; his insights keen; his ability to slip inside the skin of his characters (especially women) astounding.

Janet Burroway

[The author is] a chronicler of decency, pluck and joy [who has] given us the weight and worth of the ordinary.
— The New York Times Book Review

Esquire

Price seems to be positively channeling his honey-tongued woman narrator.

Richard Bernstein

Reading Roxanna Slade is like sitting through a long an languid North Carolina evening...listening to an intimate summing-up of a hard life....It promises to stay in the mind long after the final page is turned.
— The New York Times

James Schiff

Roxanna is someone we listen to, and her words are almost palpable in their poetic intensity...her story reveals the grandeur and mystery that can be found in the close examination of a single life....Through Roxanna's voice, Price demonstrates that he, more than any of his contemporaries, is indeed a singer of stories.
— Raleigh News & Observer

Dan Wiegand

A profoundly and provocatively hope-filled book -- Spiritual...masterful...compelling.
— San Francisco Chronicle

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Many of the virtues that have endeared Price ("Kate Vaiden") to readers are present in this story of a North Carolina woman and several generations of her family. Price's musically cadenced, nostalgia-washed prose, plangent with portent and loss and vibrant with imagery, is as beguiling as ever. His picture of life in the South a century ago is imbued with candor about customs and attitudesespecially those concerning women and race. Equally evident is his tendency to construct improbably melodramatic events, a propensity that almost throws the novel off course. In the space of three hours on her 20th birthday in 1920, Roxanna Dane meets Larkin Slade, accepts his proposal of marriage and watches him drown. Even in the few pages it takes to recount these events, Price so thickly foreshadows tragedy that one grows impatient. Most of what happens to Roxanna for the first half of the book is strictly interior, a mystical soul-searching that has little to do with outside events: "I almost think the main part of my life has passed in my mind, hid even from me," she muses. Yet Price excels in documenting the remainder of Roxanna's life with sensitive attention to emotional detail, especially in his well-grounded descriptions of her debilitating clinical depression. And after Roxanna marries Larkin's brother Palmer, bears his children and learns about his infidelity, the second half of the novel perks up with some old-fashioned soap-opera juicethanks mainly to the horrendous legacy of slavery and its repercussions. The same voice that was overwrought when trying to describe a young girl's awakening becomes more interestingly idiosyncratic when looking at the New South, which Roxanna lives to experience and describe. FYI: Price's earlier novels, "Kate Vaiden" and "Clear Pictures", are being reissued to coincide with this novel's publication.

Washington Post Book World

Here is language you can swim in, inhale, and savor on the tip of your tongue.

Charlotte Observer

Price proves yet again why he is one of America's most esteemed writers.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A taut...highly affecting read.

Janet Burroway

[The author is] a chronicler of decency, pluck and joy [who has] given us the weight and worth of the ordinary.
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A lovingly detailed record of a long and seemingly modest life, given resonance by the prolific Price's extraordinary language and his sharp eye for the subtle complexities of character ("The Promise of Rest", 1995, etc.). Roxana Slade, born with the century, looks back from the near present over her long and (seemingly) uneventful life as a wife and mother in a small North Carolina town. While seeming to focus on the ups and downs of her marriage to the decent, somewhat stolid Palmer, and the lives of her son and daughter, she also creates a rich portrait of a community dragged reluctantly out of its venerable agricultural existence into the raucous modern world. She begins by loving Palmer's younger brother, the handsome, flamboyant Larkin, until, in one of the tragedies that inevitably touch most lives, he dies in an accident. It's only later that the quiet Palmer comes to her attention. Using a first-person narrative plays to Price's strengths: Roxana's language is frank, seemingly unadorned, but subtly colored both by a tart regional flavor and by a nicely idiosyncratic rhythm and pace. And her detailed portrait of an extended southern family over time reminds us of Price's fascination with the decisive impact of the family, for good or ill, on individuals. There are appropriately dark scenes as well: Roxana, sinking into a bitter depression, briefly assaults her own daughter. And Palmer, though he is a devout and kindhearted figure, strikes his oldest friend in a fit of anger, blinding him in one eye. What emerges from Roxanaþs unblinking recollections is a portrait of an affectionate woman who has learned to master her own anger, come to grips with her regrets, andwho has drawn from the incidents of her life a hard-earned wisdom. Roxana is a memorable figure, and further indication of Price's quiet, precise power as a novelist.