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Finding Peace
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18639 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1991 |
2,724 Words |
| Author
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George Garrett
George Garrett is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Virginia. He has written numerous
short story and poetry collections and novels, his latest
being Entered From the Sun. In 1989 he received the T.S. Eliot
Award and more recently, the PEN/Faulkner Bernard Malamud
Award for Short Fiction. |
THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE
Reynolds Price
New York: Atheneum, 1991
255 pp., $21.95
The Foreseeable Future, Reynolds Price's twenty-second book in a career that began in 1962 with the publication of A Long and Happy Life, consists of three long stories, one, (the title story), almost of novel length, each related to the others by a network of thematic concerns; by place, Price's North Carolina; by a variety of technical devices; and by a series of subtle echoes, images, and shadows.
The first in the sequence, "The Fare to the Moon," concerns one full day in the life of Kayes Paschal--the day he must report for his preinduction physical during World War Ii--and the lives of wife Daphne, and young son Curt, whom he has more or less abandoned for the sake of his passionate love for Leah Birch, a black woman he has known all his life, (she is the niece of his grandmother's servant and cook), and his brother, Riley, who is running the family farm and doing his level best to hold things together. In this story, as in the other two, the narrator stays close to the protagonist. Yet, by a delightful sleight of hand, Price allows the omniscient narrator--so graceful these segues they are barely noticed except where the voice suddenly changes from third person to first, or vice versa--to enter the points of view of each of the other central characters, adding complexity and ambiguity (not to mention verisimilitude) which give these stories deep roots. "The Fare to the Moon" has an unusual closure, pushing the reader forward into the next story. Kayes Paschal passes his physical and is shipped off to Fort Jackson for basic training. (In one of very few errors of detail Price calls it "boot camp," a term that was, until very recently, reserved for the transformation of civilians into Marines or sailors in the U.S. Navy.) Riley has driven Leah off to the bus station. Price does not, and need not, note that an actual interracial marriage would have been unlawful at that time. The story ends with the son, Curt, half in dream, forgiving his father and becoming a man, about to enjoy "the first whole day of his grown man's life."
"The Foreseeable Future" takes place during the week of Sunday, May 6 through Friday, May 11, 1945. Whit Wade, a badly wounded veteran of the D-Day landing in Normandy less than a year before, now making his way as a troubled civilian and as an insurance claims adjustor, goes out on the road, Monday through Friday, doing his job (people work for a living in these Price
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