Good Hearts/A Common Room:

...The Mustian family- mainly Rosacoke and her brothers Milo and Rato- were the source of Price's stunning first published story ("A Chain of Love") and first two novels...

...This everyday sense of the sacred, of religion as a natural element of life, is present in all of Price's work, and gives it a dimension that is lacking in the cramped landscape of most contemporary fiction...

...While I admire the work of both, I found the theme of spirituality and Christianity in their fictions more allegorical than literal, a kind of theological puzzle to be solved through symbols and codes...

...This modest house would be home till then...

...Despite my appreciation of Price as a literary essayist illuminating the Christian message, I did not at once turn back to his fiction...

...The players in the drama seem to know or sense instinctively they are part of a scheme of things grandREVIEWERS MARY C. SEGERS is associate professor of political science at Rutgers University and Henry Luce Fellow in theology at Harvard Divinity School...

...Dan Wakefield When I started going back to church as a mid-dle-aged writer who had shut off religious inquiry since college, I naturally had many questions for my minister...

...er than they can fathom, and though the acuteness of their real pain is not softened by such knowledge it is somehow made honorable by it, or seems to be so in the reader's perception of their rendered lives...

...What I most appreciated in the novel was this sense of a person for whom God and prayer and guidance or sometimes the lack of it is a natural part of life, not stuck in, not used as symbol, but simply there, as common as air and water, the relation of a human being to "a palpable God...

...No hope of daylight before nearly seven...

...Fortunately, the Reverend Carl Scovel of Kings's Chapel, a Christian Unitarian church in Boston, is a literary as well as a literate clergyman, and he fed me just the right books at the right time to answer my particular craving and stimulate the desire for more...

...Good Hearts, like all of Price's work, is a powerful testimony of faith in the goodness at the core of human experience, in full acknowledgment of the suffering as well as joy that compose it...

...The Surface of the Earth (Atheneum, 1975, $9.95) is a family saga traced through fathers and sons and the women they love through the first half of this century, full of waste and tragic failures of communication and yet undergirded, like the earth itself, by a firm depth and mysterious order...

...I was delighted to learn that Price was bringing back Wesley and Rosa (she dropped the last syllable from her name) to tell the story of their lives after twenty-eight years of marriage in his new novel, Good Hearts...

...he had turned to doing literal translations "of "short, almost blindingly lucid Bible stories...

...She is co-author of Elusive Equality: Liberalism, Affirmative Action, and Social Change in America (Associated Faculty Press...

...We have no better witness than Reynolds Price...

...By then it was more than two a.m...

...There are also other times when "hunting the cold black dark of my room for any new sign or sight of guidance" she knows that awful frustration that is surely experienced at some time by all believers, the feeling that "I might as well have been Helen Keller in a barrel...

...I was struck by his openness in speaking about matters that I was still tiptoeing around, and inspired by the audacity and clarity of his perceptions about narrative as well as faith: We crave nothing less than perfect story...

...and in it I read A Generous Man, that comic real-life fable the author had begun with the working title that describes the combatants that stir the story to action:' 'A Mad Dog and a Boa Constrictor.'' I read again A Long and Happy Life, enjoying especially this time around the natural interplay of sacred and human (as in life,, woven together so artfully we don't always notice) in the glorious finale of a Christmas pageant in which the still unmarried Rosacoke, playing The Virgin, is pregnant with Wesley's child...

...it is in fact when he hears and registers her experience that his own distorted vision is altered...

...I remembered being caught at once by the headlong rush of a Faulkner-length opening sentence that also reminded me of the locomotive force that begins one of my all-time favorite novels, William Styr-on's Lie Down in Darkness...

...For his own purposes as he waits, he may hide behind all but impenetrable screens- holocausts, individual agonized lifetimes-but the merciful intent of his hand is eventually discernible by an attentive patient witness...

...They well understand that they give us one choice-if we call them untrue, we must call them insane...

...The daily life representation of religion I was looking for- as a natural part of experience, of the order of things-I found more in the work of Jewish writers like Isaac Bashe-vis Singer and Chaim Potok...

...It is a life in North Carolina begun in 1925 of an "ordinary" person's trials and tragedies and grace and brightness, the details and voices of that miracle of how a person can "last through time . . . all those separate days stacked before you, each one the same length and built from steel...

...and while we chatter or listen all our lives in a din of craving-jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days-we are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true: History is the will of a just God who knows us...

...I had read and appreciated his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, when it appeared in its entirety in Harpers in 1961...

...One of the most important volumes he handed me early on was A Palpable God, by Reynolds Price (Northpoint, 1985, $9.50), described in its subtitle as "Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible With an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative...

...I was carried swiftly and surely through a lyrical story of suspenseful young love that at last (to the reader's relief, rooting them on) joins the lives of two contemporary smalltown Southerners, Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers...

...Even the rapist, in his twisted behavior, is rendered from his point of view as well as his victim's...

...Wesley returns from his wandering search and his life is re-joined with Rosa, not in a blazing romantic renewal but an act that is far more stirring than any emotional or sexual fireworks: "the unlikely choice of two normal creatures to work again at a careful life...

...He presented not only his English versions of those stories but also the thoughts and conclusions that writing them brought him...

...Price, however, presents his characters with a wholeness of vision that includes their brokenness as part of their humanity, so people who are usually seen as types or cliches to be scorned become particular individuals...

...I was surprised as I was pleased and- as a writer newly returned to church, affirmed-to learn that Price, one of the widely admired novelists of my generation, was a Christian who not only professed his faith but saw it as central to his life and work...

...The older man having an affair with a pretty young blonde who works at a local hospital and lives in a trailer, while the wife he left behind is raped, sounds like the stuff of soapy melodrama...

...They are now gathered in a single paperback volume called Mustian (Bal-lantine, $4.95, 361 pp...

...They have moved from the small town of Afton, North Carolina, to Raleigh where he works as a mechanic and she is a secretary in a college English Department...

...The first time I felt that kind of "spiritual realism'' in a contemporary American novel whose characters were Christian was a year or so ago when I picked up a paperback copy of Price's Kate Vaiden (Ballantine, $4.95, 376 pp), which had won The National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986.1 was gripped at once by the narrative force of the story and pulled headlong into the life of "a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years...

...It will be a long and harshly trying time for Rosa, not only because of her husband's absence but because it is followed almost at once by the entry into their bedroom of a rapist...

...Most of his characters are- as he wrote of his own parents- "religious but not churchly"-and God is sometimes absent to them but never dead...

...This faith is stated most plainly and eloquently in his essay "At the Heart" that concludes the brilliant new collection Common Room: "We steadily flee a creator who can tend both the slow wheel of the galaxies and our own feverish escape while he awaits our return...

...Kate is not a churchgoer or an overtly religious person, and yet she prays, and there are times that she feels "led on, planned for and protected...

...Knowing nothing of this, Wesley has gone in search of relief from his own mid-life malaise to Nashville, and moved in with a twenty-six-year-old radiology technician he met in a bar on New Year's Eve...

...Since my own return to faith, whenever I had heard mentions of religion as part of the concern of contemporary American literature, the writers usually cited were Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy...

...It had room enough for the small calm pleasures that would not be rare...

...She writes in the journal that tells us part of the story: "I tried to pray and discovered God was nowhere to be found, not by me...

...At a time of questioning his own beliefs (the Bible stories he called "the bases of my life") and his work as a writer of fiction (at age thirty-five he asked' 'Could I go on for decades maybe, laboring to tell complex narratives to shrinking audiences...

...DAN wakeheld is a novelist and journalist whose books include Island in the City, Selling Out, Under the Apple Tree, and, most recently, Returning: A Spiritual Journey (Doubleday...

...He reported that after writing the translations: I, like millions, am convinced and have always been by the stories themselves-their narrative perfection, the speed and economy with which they offer all the heart's last craving in shapes as credible as any friend's tale of a morning walk...

...It seems a deep and quiet triumph, as does their future: ' 'They could not know they were safe till their endings, which would be hard and slow a long way off...

...Looking back, I did not remember any religious dimension to the story (I would hardly have been looking for one at that time) and when Price referred in A Palpable God to his "twenty-one years of work as a narrator of human encounters with the sacred," I took it as literary metaphor...

...They are plainly not deceitful...

...So I clamped my teeth, pulled up the afghan that Mama made Horace, and composed my hands to wait out the time...

...They make just as many mistakes and no doubt commit as many sins and suffer as much as their atheistic fictional counterparts, but there is a dignity to them that is bestowed by the author and derives I think in some basic way from their natural faith in something beyond and outside of their own skins...

...and I plainly call them true, in some awareness of the range of objections...

...Rosa at forty-eight is reasonably happy with her life and does not know that Wesley at fifty is critically discontent with his until one day shortly before Christmas he simply disappears, not even leaving a note...

...God was more real to me in Potok's The Chosen than in any other novel I knew of current American life...

...I was grateful for this clear statement of what I felt myself but was too unsure and timid to articulate...