The Promise of Rest (Price, Reynolds, Great Circle.)

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable book...in a bad way
Review: As an English major, I thought that I would try out some contemporary Southern fiction for a change. Unfortunately, I tried "A Promise of Rest" by Reynolds Price. Perhaps the most irksome thing about the book is the dialogue. From the very first page, people converse with each other in perfect English. Students in Hutch's class debate about the role of race in literature, pontificating in seemingly endless sentences. One student plays an imaginary banjo and even sings a few lines of a slave minstrel song! I have never been in that type of English class and never will be, simply because they do not exist. Even the most brilliant people refuse to speak perfect English. The dialogue problems lead to a larger problem: the characters become unbelievable and their motivations transparent. The best thing to say about this book is that at times, it is moderately believable. The only reason I sludged through the book was to see if Price could create a character that was believable in any way: actions, motivations, even dialogue. It never happened. The plot itself (of a man coming to grip with his son's AIDS and eventual death) is a good concept, but it is executed poorly. Perhaps I am being overly picky. I would suggest this book to the casual reader looking for a good and simple yarn. I would not suggest this book to an astute reader looking for a great literary story. I personally regret wasting my time on this novel.

Rating:
Summary: I'd give it a 0-star rating if I could.
Review: Frankly, Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest is one of the worst books I've ever had the misfortune to read. If it hadn't been for the fact that it was assigned reading for my MFA class, I'd have thrown it across the room by page 15. Price commits practically every literary sin that exists, including the unforgivable telling instead of showing: he explains the characters' every reaction and motivation as the story moves (very slowly and in 350 pages) along, making the reader feel a bit stupid and left out, as if he or she can't possibly understand without some authorial intervention. Some of his other, more egregious transgressions are the characters' identical and unrealistic speech patterns (particularly the fact that everyone calls everyone else "old friend" or "sir"), the vague and often unfulfilled implications of meaning in much of the dialogue, the grand, philosophical statements and epiphanies, such as "He suddenly knew that this would be the last time...," and "It was the first time that he had ever thought...," and "Until now he had never understood...," which seem to come in every other paragraph. The writing itself is terribly strained and highfalutin, with allusions to great cultures and ages and beauty tossed in randomly and without conclusion, as if Price went through and added them in late revisions. The smaller frustrations I felt are too numerous for me to mention here.

As for its content, Price took a promisingly touching theme-that of a man returning to his estranged parents to die of AIDS-and made it into his own little soapbox from which to complain about the state of the world we live in. Soapboxes have their place in literature, but the political agendas of Promise of Rest outweigh the story to the point that the reader can't help but feel a little insulted. In particular, I noticed a vein of misogyny running through the text. At one point the main character, an older man named Hutch, says, "Everybody with eyes in the past three centuries knows that white women were the engines of slavery," which by itself might seem innocuous and perhaps true, in some way and to a degree, but later other characters say things like, "women's training and doubts and pluming problems," and "Skin is mainly what's killed men always. And women have certainly used theirs for harm." These sentences may be taken out of context, but the message of the book is that men are only victims and rarely if ever guilty of anything. The main female character, Ann, vacillates between bitchy and whiny and ; Price blames much of Hutch's unhappiness on her decisions. The other women lack the strength and independence that even the weakest male character embodies, and they exist primarily in roles of caretaking. Besides an attack on the feminine, the book tries to tackle other ethical issues such as racism, sexuality, and religion without much effort on the part of the author or, for that matter, success.

I haven't read the first two books of this trilogy, and if I knew they would give a greater insight into Reynolds Price and his characters, I might give them a try. But I doubt I will, in the hopes of never having to go through this awful experience again. At its best, The Promise of Rest offers hope to all aspiring writers: If this book can get published, then by God your novel should have no problem.

PS. I don't mind being called a "psuedo-literati," though I prefer "literati-in-training;" I don't mind being accused of something I don't even agree with (I've read other books by Southerners that I absolutely enjoyed, and I'm as anti-Gap as anyone); but none of these facts make the book good by any stretch of the imagination. ....

Rating:
Summary: Chillingly real and poetic! Hard to put down.
Review: I am reading the Great Circle novels backwards -- which may be an advantage! I found reading Price's language like eating rich food. There is no speed-reading this author! You want to savour every sentence, every beautifully wrought phrase and expression. He reminds me painfully of my own southern roots, and makes me mourn for the loss in my transplanted soul of what seems to be a particularly southern appreciation for the beauty and majesty of our American language.

And it is simply a good read! I found it difficult to put down. And there were times when I had to put it down, overwhelmed as I often was by a scene, or a speech, or a description. Reynolds Price is a treasure!

Rating:
Summary: I recommend this Book to everyone
Review: I simply can say enough how much I loved this book. I am an avid reader, reading approximately 2 books a month and this was my all time favorite. It was incrediably touching to witness the relationship between father and son. I cried at the end because I was so sad the book ended. Because this is the holiday season and people are always swaping ideas for presents, this is the first suggestion I make.

Rating:
Summary: Dying of AIDS
Review: I was a student in Reynolds Price's creative writing class in 1966.Certainly he has been successful.His academic credentials are formidable--he graduated 1st in his class from college and was a Rhodes Scholar.This year among my other reading I have read 3 of his novels:"The Promise Of Rest" "Roxanna Slade" and "Blue Calhoun".(I have also read his compilation of short stories) Of these 3, I consider "Roxanna Slade" to be possibly the most psychologically astute, since it deals in part at some depth with an ordinary married woman's depression. "Blue Calhoun" is about pedophilia, though not quite so extreme as the rocker Jerry Lee Lewis's variety. It also contains some interesting plot twists and turns towards the end, and is well worth reading. It is also, remarkable as we shall see, relatively devoid of racism. "Promise Of Rest" deals with AIDS, so it is in some ways the most contemporary. My big problem with Price is his racism, which turns up as a key issue is many of his novels, apparently. Though the racism is not pervasive,and he attempts to make amends for it in the end, every time it comes up, I feel outraged. But make no mistake about it: this is the racism that is the legacy of Thomas Jefferson-style southern plantations,the Negro concubine, where uppity Negroes are dealt with with physical violence, and characters still refer to the Civil War as "the war of Northern aggression."The protagonists of "Rest"(named Hutchins) and of "Roxanna" in their self-important swagger remind me of Big Daddy in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof." All
of Price's novels are written in the same lilting Southern dialect which is supposed to be charming and I suppose it can be so viewed. It has certainly worked for him. Price has created some memorable characters in these three novels, notably Alice Matthews and the old Negro Grainger in this one. At times, the novels are not perfectly organized and the endings sometimes strain credibility as he attempts to tie up the loose ends--fortunately, from my point of view, this is where most of the racism gets thrown in the recycle bin."Rest" is redolent of Southern family tradition as revealed by the numerous letters exchanged among the protagonists.This novel also has a lot more going for it: students who are not major characters come and go, a trip to New York, some interesting if quixotic New York characters. Like all his novels I have read this novel is essentially quite regional. Price, interestingly, has a most liberated view of sex, either heterosexual and homosexual depending on the novel, and these views are openly expressed by both the women (Roxanna Slade) and by the men, and sex is a fairly prominent feature of human relationships in his novels. This is similar to the sultriness of Tennessee Williams' plays. Death and disease are also ever-present in all three novels--just when you start liking a character a little, he dies, and this includes many of the major characters. Other important themes include love, work, and food.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read and Packs a Powerful Punch
Review: I will admit that when I read the first two books in the triology telling the lives of the Mayfield and Kendal families, I found myself a little bored. However, upon picking up the final volume of the bunch, I was enthralled from the beginging. I can't put it down. I recommend this book to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Ignore the pseudo-literati ...
Review: If you can't appreciate the American South or have no desire to try to understand it, be warned: You'll find fault with this book. However, if you are familiar with the underlying social mores of the South, you'll likely connect with this novel.

Rating:
Summary: An Old South sensibility confronts the modern Plague
Review: It was a great pleasure to (re)discover Reynolds Price in this book. I had put him aside many, many years ago when I read A Long and Happy Life and couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about. My loss, it seems. I must now revisit the many books he has published over the last few decades because having read The Promise of Rest, I am sure I have missed a lot that is worthwhile.

This book, about an aging southern poet/professor who brings his only son, suffering from AIDS, back from New York to die at home, is a beautifully written and touching portrait of the characters involved. But more, it is in many ways the typical 'Southern' novel, where the tragic outcome and any hope of redemption are all bound up with family history, race, sex, friendship, the 'wages of sin' and the weight of history. There is a sensibility at work here, as in Peter Taylor's work, that seems, in its particular experession, uniquely southern but manages to be, in its effect upon the reader, universal.

This is a very moving book. The only problem I experienced in reading it was a slight twitch whenever the main character would speak of his own early same sex experiences. In these scenes, the language Price put into the protagonist's mouth seemed artifical and strained, and the euphemisms chosen to refer to body parts and sexual activity were so strange that even a Victorian would have laughed at them. Nevertheless, the story engaged the reader from the beginning and despite the inevitability of the outcome, maintained a strong emotional hold. I was deeply moved by this book, which, like the best of southern writing, left me questioning much in my own life and times.

Rating:
Summary: dying of aids
Review: Judging by the fact that his books have been translated into 16 languages, he must be doing something right, despite the fact that his books are regional in character. Every time I read one of his books (and I have read three) I get very upset about the racism. It's as if the guy never heard of the Civil Rights Movement. It is a deeply ingrained quality that is imprinted on his soul so to speak and is difficult for him to shake, like trying to quit smoking. He gives evidence of trying to deal with the modern world. But his books often end up sounding like Tennessee Williams plays with their plantation mentality. In spite of this criticism, his books are an enjoyable read, with their focus on family, sex, food, and death.

Rating:
Summary: A more fundamental challenge to the pseudo-literati
Review: The cliche of every creative writing class is "show, don't tell." The problem with that philosophy is that true literature can be defined as breaking free of cliches. Unless you abandon omniscient narrator or (most) first-person narrations as literary devices, you will be engaging in some sort of "telling."

Now, as for believability, literature is a tool for the communication of ideas, just as color and light are to a painter. Would you tell Picasso that it is simply not believable for a woman to have two eyes on one side of her head? I would encourage anyone who has questions about the role of believability in literature to read Maupin's The Night Listener. He clarifies that literary truth transcends the believability of the narrative.

In summary:

1) In literature, it is perfectly acceptable to "tell" versus "show" if "telling" is the best way to communicate your ideas.
2) In literature, believability is irrelavant if the amalgamation of words effectively communicates the writer's ideas.