Synopsis
Returning to his North Carolina family home to die from AIDS, Wade Mayfield induces feelings and patience in his attending, divorced parents that initiate a possible reunion and the perpetuation of a proud family tradition. 40,000 first printing. Tour.
Reviews
This dark, haunting successor to The Surface of Earth and The Source of Light adds a contemporary chapter to the tormented Mayfield family's 90-year saga. Wade Mayfield, great-grandson of the woman whose runaway marriage in 1903 set the family's tragic 20th-century history in motion, is dying of AIDS. Long estranged from his parents (his black lover, Wyatt Bondurant, hated them as complicit beneficiaries of the South's racist past), Wade comes home to North Carolina in April 1993, after Wyatt's death. His mother, Ann, has left his father, Hutchins, claiming that her husband has shut her out of his life for years. Meanwhile, Hutchins's lifelong friend and onetime lover, Strawson Stuart, makes his own reproaches about Hutchins's inability to fully accept love. Extended family and friends gather around the dying Wade, grappling with matters as general as America's poisoned racial heritage and as intimate as the Mayfield legacy: "burning what they called love as their treacherous, always vanishing fuel when what they craved was merely time; more time above ground anyhow to feed their dry unquenchable sovereign hearts." Price's characters are fierce people who know the damage they have caused and don't presume to think they can redress it. Yet a deep religious sentiment permeates the novel, holding out the promise of rest for Wade and anyone else who can learn to accept life whole, with all its splendor and cruelty. The book closes, like its predecessors, with the family wedding ring passing into new hands that may put it to healing use. Price's prose-distinctively Southern yet uniquely his own, with its ring of North Carolina's brisk cadences and his characters' flinty personalities-provides just the right vehicle for his passionate, unsentimental consideration of American life as seen through its truest prism: the family. A crowning achievement in the career of one of our finest writers.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Price's first novel since the magnificent Blue Calhoun (1992) rips readers' emotions as forcibly but honestly as its predecessor. Price's interest in love, particularly the trials and triumphs of its give-and-take, is expressed here through a father witnessing the long, slow, tortuous death of his son. Completing a trilogy begun with The Surface of Earth (1975) and continued in The Source of Light (1982), Price brings the story of North Carolinian Hutch Mayfield up to the present. Hutch is now in his early 60s, a university teacher recently separated from his wife. Hutch's son, Wade, lies dying in New York from AIDS, and over Wade's protestations, Hutch can't help but go to New York and carry Wade back home to live out the rest of his quickly extinguishing life. Such devastation is the ironic catalyst for Hutch's reconnection to individuals with whom he should never have lost touch. This rich, difficult, but nonetheless beautiful novel speaks eloquently, even soaringly, about reconciliation and closure, awareness and awakening, and life's mysterious but inexorable cycles and patterns. Yes, Price's style is still mandarin, and all his characters have the same speech patterns and draw from the same ornate vocabulary, but these are mere bumps in an otherwise stunning roadway. Brad Hooper
At the end of The Source of Light (LJ 3/1/81), poet Hutchins Mayfield reluctantly returns home from Oxford University to see his father into death. In Price's new novel, Raven Wade Mayfield, Hutch's son, lies blind and dying from AIDS in New York City. Without Wade's asking, Hutch and his older friend, Strawson Stuart, travel north to bring Wade home to Durham to die. The long return trip begins an agonizing journey of loss, separation, recognition, and reconciliation for the Mayfield clan. Their struggles echo the strains of Greek tragedy. In his crystalline, lyric prose, Price evokes the poetry of need and passion that animates the soul and the grace and gratefulness that respond to such needs. Price is one of our great contemporary poets of the human condition. Highly recommended.
--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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