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The Mystery Beneath: Commentary on Reynolds Price's Roxanna Slade
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16885 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1998 |
3,378 Words |
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Daphne Athas
Daphne Athas is a novelist and essayist who teaches at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
"Every time somebody calls me a saint, I repeat my name and tell them no saint was ever named Roxy." So begins Reynolds Price's new novel, Roxanna Slade, a chronicle of a ninety-year-old woman's life. Since negatives impel positives, the reader is lured into a state of moral wonder: What does it mean for an ordinary person to be good over a long lifetime? Roxanna tells her story with homey eloquence.
She is humble, funny, dutiful, modest, distant, and quite irresistible in spite of her virtues. She claims little for herself and has led, if not an exemplary life, one that is stalwart and measured. Like most of Price's work, Roxanna Slade is not so much a novel of plot as one of time and the small things that happen to people in a backwater. Reviewers have suggested that it is Price's millennium novel. Certainly it deals with the history of the twentieth century as 2000 approaches, for Roxanna was born in 1900. But it focuses on Price's customary themes of race, religion, and love and is one of his most entertaining books.
Springs feed the backwater
Reynolds Price grew up in a part of eastern North Carolina that remained virtually unchanged from Reconstruction until 1945. As he recalled in an interview some years back, "This part of North Carolina is where 95 percent of my emotional intensity has been grounded. ... When I was born in 1933 there were several people alive in my family who had clear memories of the Civil War. ... My grandmother had met General Lee when she was a little girl."
He started writing at Duke University and went on to win a Rhodes
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