Price Reynolds Good Hearts

PRICE, REYNOLDS: OUT ON THE PORCH, CHAPEL HILL, N C ALGONQUIN BOOKS 1992
0945575039 Good ZAUNER PUBLICATIONS

LC 92-1053;122 PAGES; INDEX; PHOTOS; ILLUSTRATIONS; REYNOLD PRICE; OUT ON THE PORCH; ALGONQUIN BOOKS; CHAPEL HILL, N C; 1992; ISBN 0945575039;PORCHES; LITERARY COLLECTION; PHOTO ESSAY; NOT FIRST; BK & DJ=GOOD; HC; 8VO; NOT SIGNED; MY DESK; 32.00;; THE AUTHOR CELEBRATES PORCHES,HOW WE LIVE ON THEM AND THE WAY WE FEEL ABOUT THEM; A SUBJECT WHICH GOES STRAIGHT TO OUR HEARTS;STACK 0016 SHELF 6; C-0000 Good Cloth 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall Private Press

[SW: PORCHES; LITERARY COLLECTION; PHOTO ESSAY]

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Price, Reynolds: Good Hearts, Ballantine March 13, 1989 ISBN: 0345357078
,,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.

Condition;Good ,Paperback ,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.

Details

Price, Reynolds. Clear Pictures : First Loves, First Guides. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Atheneum, 1989. ISBN: 0689120753

First edition FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING (10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1). 304 pages filled with numerous black & white photographs. Book is NEAR FINE/AS NEW (unread) with scraping on the half title and author's book list pages. Dust jacket is FINE/AS NEW. JMVintage specializes in books, magazines, and treasures related to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor...and other curious people. Dust jacket reads: In such novels as A Long and Happy Life, Kate Vaiden and the recent Good Hearts, Reynolds Price has drawn on memories of his early life in the countryside and small towns of North Carolina. But he has seldom written directly from the facts of that past. Now in Clear Pictures he returns to the first two decades of his life in search of the things that made and formed him. The findings make a vivid, warm but unsparing portrait of a time and place that are now mostly gone-the upper South in a time of great change, from 1933 to 1954. And clearly lighted, in the midst of the picture, stand the men and women, white and black, who surround a young boy with honest care and guide him toward his manhood and work. The foreword describes how a course of hypnotic treatments for pain triggered in the author a flood of early memory and, eventually, this book. Then in closely linked chapters, he focuses on each of the persons who affected him most. He begins with his young parents, burdened by private demons and beset by the financial woes of the Depression. He moves to an older sister of his mother's, who becomes a vital example of love and loyalty. He charts the crucial importance of black men and women in his growing sense of a poisonous evil at work in his place and among his kin. He moves to his younger brother, then a generous bachelor cousin, his childhood friends and enemies, the teachers who fostered his art and writing, and those who fed and complicated the start of his spiritual need. In the end, he writes of the climax and end of youth, the death of his father, and of how a good man leaned on an elder son and gave him a father's largest gift. Clear Pictures is also a gallery of powerful faces. Some are admirable, even noble; some are comic and brave. A few are tragic, a few evil. But most of them earn true heroism in the author's eyes as they shape his future by letting him witness and share their fate. Few autobiographies look so closely, and gratefully, at the kin and friends, foes and guides, who start a young life and set its course. Hard Cover condition: Fine in Fine dj

[SW: Biography/Autobiography]

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Reynolds Price: Good Hearts, Athenaeum ISBN: 0689119739

Hardcover Good 0689119739 xlibrary HC lamenated DJ

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