Happily Ever After
TRACY, HONOR
Happily Ever After A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE By Reynolds Price Atheneum. 195 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by HONOR TRACY Author, "The Prospects are Pleasing," "A Season of Mists" This beautiful book by...
...Somehow Reynolds Price manages to convey a sense of everything in human life that is fixed, unchanging and immemorial at the very moment when his people are at their simplest and most localized, eating a cold supper beside a lake, waiting for a tiresome sister-in-law to bring forth or merely singing carols out of tune...
...Or so he tells us and, marveling, we can only acquiesce...
...Whereupon, without the slightest hesitation, he asked her to marry him...
...To say so is not to disparage it, for its warmth and innocence and sweetness are as precious as they are rare amid the aridities of contemporary fiction...
...Still less is it to deny the author the power of creating fleshand-blood people or of evoking a sense of time and place, for he has both in eminent degree...
...From the first moment, when Rosacoke is riding pillion with Wesley to Delight Baptist Church for the funeral of her friend Mildred, a Negro who died having an illegitimate baby, to the last, in Delight church again with various members of the community taking awkward, self-conscious part in a nativity play, the book is a triumph and a delight...
...Once upon a time a sensitive virtuous girl fell in love with a nasty youth at first sight, just watching him up in a pecan tree, "spreading his arms between the branches and bracing his feet like he was the eagle on money," and for years and years she could think of nobody else in the world, despite rebuffs and indifference and something not far from cruelty...
...Have we not heard something like this before...
...Nor does the author indicate what, if anything, there was to see...
...There is not a character here in whom we cannot believe, whom we do not seem in fact to have known somewhere...
...The end of a novel should always open a window on the future but here, so much does the mind recoil from the prospect, it seems rather to fling open a stage door and reveal only a blank wall behind it...
...This same lyrical note helps us to see, feel, touch as a child who is experiencing things for the first time does, and it is well suited to the story...
...The author might have done well to take on the convention entirely, to assure us that a good fairy waved her wand and the couple lived happily ever after...
...Altogether A Long and Happy Life is a work of art, seemingly artless and effortless...
...There is a dreamy quality about the center of it, the love of Rosacoke Mustian for Wesley Beavers, that persuades us to switch our rational and critical faculties off...
...Everything else about the oaf—his passion for streaking about on motorcycles, his Davy Crockett cap, his offhand lowbred manner, his muttering of another girl's name even while he makes love to Rosacoke, the bored illiterate postcards he scribbles to her every now and then—we can believe in all too well...
...In the hope of winning his love at last, pure as she was, she gave herself to him and conceived a child...
...It is a very long time since there was a first novel as rich in both promise and achievement...
...If we were to single out one of the book's many qualities, it might be its extraordinary timelessness...
...Of the ambience, the little town in North Carolina where these simple folk pursue their anything but simple lives, an outsider of course cannot judge...
...but I can say it rings true in the way that William Faulkner's Jefferson rings true...
...The narrative slips along smooth as oil and shot with humor, with never a superfluous word...
...This is just one point, and a minor one...
...It is not the tragedy of a woman of tenderness and refinement seized by a degrading passion or lust that he propounds, but a case of true and constant love...
...She wept bitterly and her hot tears fell on his breast and thawed the ice, and penetrated to his heart and washed out the splinter of glass...
...His unkindness wounded poor Gerda...
...For that matter, if we stop and think, we cannot really believe in the proposal of marriage at all...
...And in the descriptive passages there is a note of lyricism supported by accuracy that brings woodland, lake, bird or animal directly before our eyes...
...We are left wondering how long the dreadful misalliance can hold...
...Reviewed by HONOR TRACY Author, "The Prospects are Pleasing," "A Season of Mists" This beautiful book by a new writer is in some respects more fairy tale than novel...
...And though we can accept the character of Rosacoke without difficulty, indeed with pleasure, for loving unselfish girls do exist and there is no harm in reading about them sometimes, we cannot for the life of us imagine what she "saw" in Beavers...
...Indeed, the brevity of this remarkable young author calls for special thanks and praise as well as a prayer, doubtless vain, that he may set a fashion...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 16
