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The Good Priest's Son

Name: The Good Priest's Son
Author: Reynolds Price
ISBN: 9780743254014

by Reynolds Price

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Overview

Flying home to New York after a much needed getaway abroad, private art conservator Mabry Kincaid learns that his downtown loft has been devastated by the World Trade Center attacks. Unable to resume his normal life, he flies south to North Carolina to visit his aged father, a widowed Episcopal priest who is cared for by live-in nurse Audrey Thornton and her grown son, Marcus. During his stay — with help from his cantankerous father, Audrey, Marcus, and an alluring old flame named Gwyn — Mabry is compelled to explore his tormented relationship with his father and a world he fondly remembers but has long since abandoned. Back in New York a week later, Mabry faces his old life, which lies in ruins before his eyes. There, he must once again confront change and uncertainty — and a daunting disease that may prove fatal.

In an elegantly crafted and profoundly moving novel, Reynolds Price follows one man's wrenching journey to come to terms with two familiar worlds that have been radically altered.

Synopsis

In an elegantly crafted and profoundly moving novel, Reynolds Price follows one man's wrenching journey to come to terms with two familiar worlds that have been radically altered.

The New York Times - Claire Messud

Reynolds Price's seriousness of purpose remains undeniable. He is a writer who addresses life's urgent questions through characters much like ourselves -- fallible, frightened, lonely, seeking comfort, and sometimes even redemption, in the maelstrom. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, create a background thunder perhaps too loud for the distresses of Mabry Kincaid's one insignificant life, but that may be Price's point: even in the face of immense tragedy, each of us must still confront our own small struggles and must try, as Tasker Kincaid puts it, to ''find a soul.''

About the Author, Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

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Editorials

Gail Godwin

The Good Priest's Son is the chronicle of one man's hope for salvage when everything in his world -- including his own body -- is collapsing. Though the novel throbs with that old Ash Wednesday reminder -- "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" -- it is counterbalanced by the melodies of Price's fine ear for dialogue and his vividly depicted scenes, both in a blasted lower Manhattan in the days following Sept. 11, 2001, and in the guilt-ridden Southern hamlet where a stern but beloved father lies stricken.
— The Washington Post

Claire Messud

Publishers Weekly

The events of 9/11 serve as a catalyst for reconciliation between Mabry Kincaid, a 53-year-old Manhattan art conservator, and his father, Tasker, an Episcopal priest, in Price's 14th novel, a nuanced, quietly evocative story set in North Carolina. Mabry, who was on a cross-Atlantic flight during the attacks on the World Trade Center, decides to go to his father's home in North Carolina rather than return to his uninhabitable downtown New York apartment. In his boyhood home he finds Audrey Thornton, a golden-eyed, 4o-something African-American woman providing companionship (she's a Duke divinity student) and care for Mabry's wheelchair-bound father. Mabry's visit becomes an extended stay, and over the course of the leisurely narrative, Price (Roxanna Slade, etc.) chronicles Mabry's tentative friendship with Audrey and her son and develops Mabry's difficult father-son relationship; the novel blossoms into a heartfelt study of thorny familial love. Price also poignantly renders the exigencies of Mabry's middle age: Mabry takes up with an old flame while coming to terms with his philandering past, the death of his wife from cancer and the debilitating onset of multiple sclerosis. His discovery of a Van Gogh oil sketch also livens the story, but it is Price's assured prose and fully imagined characters and their family ties that make this emotionally resonant novel compelling. Agent, Harriet Wasserman. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Though of Southern origin, middle-aged art conservator Mabry Kincaid now considers New York City his true home. Mabry is jolted into reexamining this and other assumptions about himself when his Lower Manhattan loft becomes a casualty of the 9/11 terror attacks. Already distraught over the recent lingering death of his former wife (who has bequeathed him a fortune even though his many infidelities destroyed their marriage) and plagued with peculiar neurological symptoms, Mabry flees both the city and his adult daughter as soon as the airports reopen, heading for the hamlet in eastern North Carolina where he grew up. He finds his father, a retired Episcopal priest, recovering from a fall at a disturbingly slow pace despite excellent care from a remarkable African American graduate student and her son, an aspiring artist. A week of family stress wears Mabry down as he questions the nature of the feelings his father and daughter have for him, ponders the ethical thing to do about a mysterious painting he is holding for a client who apparently perished in the World Trade Center, and faces the possibility of a shattering, life-changing medical diagnosis. As in much of Price's other fiction, questions of love and death dominate and drive strong, unconventional characters in a thoughtful novel notable for a solid sense of place and authentic regional speech. Recommended for most fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/05.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Death hovers over an anxious homecoming in the venerable southern writer's 14th novel. Mabry Kincaid is flying back home from Europe to New York on September 11, 2001, when his plane is diverted to Nova Scotia. It will be days before the 53-year-old art conservator finds out whether his loft, just blocks from the Twin Towers, is still intact. On impulse Mabry returns to his family home in North Carolina, where his father, a retired Episcopalian priest, is in bad shape. Price (Noble Norfleet, 2002, etc.) lures the reader with a number of maybes rather than a plot. Tasker Kincaid may be at death's door; son Mabry may be diagnosed soon with multiple sclerosis; the painting he collected in Paris for a WTC client (now presumed dead) may conceal a priceless van Gogh sketch. Only one of these matters gets resolved. Tasker at least is in good hands, tended by Audrey and her teenaged son, Marcus, black folks long linked to the Kincaids. But who will tend to Mabry, who's experiencing temporary blindness and numbness? His wife died back in April, and he's estranged from daughter Charlotte. That's Mabry's fault; he cheated on his wife so often she threw him out when Charlotte was 12. But his faults don't keep self-pity from welling up, especially after Tasker admits that his greatest love was for Mabry's brother, Gabriel, killed years before in a hunting accident. Very much in the Price mold, this is a tale of family ties, broken but partially restored, of confessions and reconciliations. It's not only Mabry who couldn't keep his pants zipped: Tasker confesses to once taking advantage of three female parishioners; young Marcus confesses to impregnating his cousin at age 15. Yet the churning emotionslack a strong narrative framework, and Mabry's hand-wringing over his possible MS symptoms becomes tedious, as does the warmed-over angst following 9/11, including a scene close to Ground Zero. For all its incidental charms, one of Price's lesser novels, scattered and indecisive.