Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides

A major new work by Reynolds Price, Clear Pictures is a memoir of childhood and youth in the rural South, a story of growing up, of discovering the intricate entanglements of family, love, solitude and faith. A gallery of powerful faces and lucid memories and a rich portrait of a world now mostly vanished into the past.((Atheneum--Nonfiction)

Evoking the sights and textures of a small-town North Carolina boyhood in the 1930s and '40s, Price's memoir is remarkable for its Proustian recall. The author, a prize-winning novelist and essayist, claims that self-hypnosis in 1987 opened the floodgates of memory. Whatever the impetus, he offers a nuanced psychological self-portrait of a small child locked in a fierce, loving triad with his overanxious mother, Elizabeth, and his alcoholic father, Will. His mother's sister, calm, patient Aunt Ida, would come to serve as a "parallel, safer mother." Other formative influences included his bachelor cousin Macon Thornton, and Grant Terry, a black friend of his father who was the author's babysitter. Price ruefully contemplates his family's unthinking acceptance of institutionalized racism, a mindset from which he gradually broke free. The narrative leaves off at his father's death, an event thrusting him painfully toward maturity at age 21. Interspersed with family photographs, this lucid autobiography portrays a mind learning to trust and reach out to the world.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This memoir by the distinguished North Carolina novelist--the prose equivalent of an intense "magic-lantern" slide show--is remarkable for its opaline clarity. With a disciplined compassion and honesty, Price trains his lenses on family, neighbors, rural surroundings, and a few significant "snapshot" scenes that provide a kind of narrative continuity to a sensitive, much-loved and loving, child's slow realization of himself. Gradually the intense, passive witness becomes almost visible himself--without recourse to melodrama or florid, self-referring prose. The achievements of the autobiography are multiple, among them a clear-sighted chronicle of the rural South in the Thirties and Forties and an almost-palpable sense of the texture of relationships that succor a growing personality. But foremost is the unyielding lambent focus of the prose style through which Price records and realizes his own supple strengths as a man.
- Earl Rovit, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.