A Joyous Eden Regained
WOLFF, GEOFFREY
A Joyous Eden Regained A GENEROUS MAN By Reynolds Price Atheneum. 275 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by GEOFFREY WOLFF Book critic, Washington "Post"; lecturer, Maryland Institute of Art In his...
...It so happens that Tom, long believed killed in the war, is the father of Lois, the snake girl, and the love of the sheriff's wife...
...Eden, after Milo has loved there, is clean, uninfected with the stink and decay of Adam's shame...
...Help us to live with whatever we find...
...It is there that the sheriff learns to live with his wife's love for Milo's cousin, and there that he breaks out of his impotence...
...His heart is seeded, his loins alive...
...For Price likes the techniques and materials of the real world...
...What redeems Milo's encounter with Tom from incredibility is that by the time it occurs, we have been prepared for a world in which consequence is not necessarily limited to the possible...
...It looked back to the literature of Greek mythology, and to the initiation rites of Indian tribes, where the first kill brought manhood...
...Like Faulkner, Price writes of the rural South in the second half of the 20th century...
...Two constants provide a true North for the plot's action...
...Near the end of the novel, Milo meets the ghost of Tom, his cousin...
...A Generous Man tells the tale of a boy, Milo Mustian, and his search through a forest for his half-wit brother, Rato, a rabid dog and a 20-foot, 280pound phython which has escaped from a carnival sideshow...
...The next day he performs sexual prodigies with the wife of the sheriff, Rooster Pomeroy, who is out on the hunt...
...The forest where the search is carried out is a place of ambiguity and romance...
...He looks, relentlessly, for ways to share what he has: his sex, his wisdom, his youth and strength...
...Milo has eaten the apple, rejoiced in his sex and the fruits it enables...
...how they feel and how they are worn by the boy's touch as he lies troubled at night...
...In the course of the two days and nights during which the story transpires, he makes love in the pines to the teenage daughter of the snakekeeper travelling with the country fair that has come to his North Carolina town...
...When the hunt is over, he celebrates...
...And Milo himself is almost, yet not quite, more than we can believe...
...In a flat, droning voice, Milo explains the hunt and its purpose by beseeching God to "Help us be worthy of what we are hunting...
...One is that Milo is honest and he understands gifts...
...It is no barren place, no place where to gain knowledge is to be broken by it...
...The forest from which Milo returns is Eden, before and after the Fall...
...He gives us a good deal of information on the way things are done: how to farm land, how to build a boat, how to weather a storm...
...Faulkner's tale, freighted with symbolic resonance, added substantially to the modern vocabulary of mythic action...
...While Price's method of treating characters and events is laden with stylized language and gestures of the kind that characterize the romances of, say, Hawthorne, he can write with extraordinary concentration on physical reality: the wooden grapes carved on Milo's bed, for example...
...the search itself, a parable stuffed-though we never knew it before we heard it-in our consciousness...
...And when he writes, " there was Milo asleep, stretched on top of sheets creased as storm water, naked hair to heel," or when he describes Milo's farm, his mother, or the vet's office to which they take the rabid dog, he reassures us that we are looking at the things, the manners and customs of a world we have seen and could know...
...Fecund, hopeful, they wait for him to grow...
...lecturer, Maryland Institute of Art In his long story, "The Bear," William Faulkner used a boy's first hunt as a parable for breaking out of the prison of youthful innocence...
...Coincidence abounds in Price's tight and lovely plot...
...Reynolds Price, winner of the William Faulkner award for an earlier novel, employs the same techniques, mixing the immediacy of realism with the playing out of symbolic events, to construct a story which is at once credible and singular...
...There also, Milo meets Tom, the snake is killed, and debts are paid...
...He is wise beyond belief, his understanding and canniness far exceed his 15 years...
...And in the forest Milo learns that honor, pride and, most especially, love can survive the taint of the Fall...
...The effect, for instance, of Price's attempt to enter the minds of the snake and the dog as they are about to fight, is only salvaged from the comic by the narrator's sharp focus on detail...
...But Price does not merely exploit details, he works them, fugue-like, against the things of the world that lie beyond description and explanation...
...A Generous Man lives so close to fantasy that incredibility threatens to consume it...
...The other constant is the patience of the women who wait for him at the Mustian farm...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 10
