Good Hearts - Hardcover

Reynolds Price

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689119739 ISBN 13: 9780689119736

Publisher: Athenaeum, 1988

Synopsis

In this love story set in North Carolina and Tennessee, Wesley Beaver plans to abandon his thirty-year marriage to Rosacohe Mustian, but his decision forces them to confront questions of faith, commitment and will, love and good heartedness

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers are beloved of readers who met them in Price's first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Here they are again. Their marriage has indeed been three decades long, but has it been happy? Rosa thinks so, but Wesley feels dead of heart, facing "a black wall of defeat." In other words, midlife crisis. So he leaves Rosa one morning just before Christmas, drives to Nashville and begins an affair with a warm and supportive 26-year-old woman named Wilson. Suffused with guilt and bewilderment, abandoned Rosa begins to receive ominous phone calls, and on New Year's Eve she awakens to a rapist in her bed. The ensuing events give Price a chance to ruminate about the omnipresence of God and His role in individual lives, the stages of marital love, the pitting of personal fulfillment against loyalty and responsibility. He does so in the sweet singing voice that distinguishes his fiction, mixing plain and lofty words, finding fresh and provocative similes, managing to be both humorous and poignant. His ability to portray simple, good-hearted country folk without condescensionRosa's elderly mother, her slightly dimwitted brother Rato, wise old black Mary, a waitress in a dineris as finely tuned as ever. In this fable-like narrative, however, there is a superfluity of good people, generous motives and noble behavior. Even the rapist, it turns out, is motivated by a desire to bestow "the actual worship that all women dream of." The narrative at times reminds one of a high-minded hymn to the essential goodness of human nature. While no Price novel can be called a disappointment, this one may leave readers feeling they have swallowed a marshmallow sundae. Literary Guild main selection.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

North Carolinian Price published his first novel, A Long & Happy Life , in 1962; more than 25 years and 15 books later, Good Hearts is not exactly a sequel so much as a revisit to the lives of Rosacoke and Wesley Beavers, the young lovers of that first novel. After 30 years of marriage, Wes leaves home at Christmastime in a fit of malaise, leaving Rosa alone to become the victim of a young rapist. Price is a mature and stylish storyteller who imbues his characters with layers of human dimension, and his view of marriage in the autumn of life is poignantly on-target. A richly successful novel that will be welcomed in most fiction collections. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Athenaeum
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0689119739
• ISBN 13: 9780689119736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276