Midstream
An Unfinished Memoir
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
The final book—a memoir on which he was working at the time of his death—from Reynolds Price, “one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction” (The New York Times).
In her foreword, Anne Tyler calls Reynolds Price “an exclamation point in a landscape of mostly declarative sentences.” When Price died in 2011, he left behind a final manuscript—two hundred candid, heartrending, and marvelously written pages about a critical period in his young adulthood. Approaching thirty, Price writes, is to face the notion that “This is it. I’m now the person I’m likely to be.” Midstream details the final youthful adventures of a man on the cusp of artistic acclaim. Here, Price chases a doomed love to England, only to meet heartbreak. Determined to pursue other pleasures, Price journeys to Rome with poet Stephen Spender, sharing an afternoon with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Price finds company in New York with a group of artists as he awaits the publication of his first novel, and, back in North Carolina, he begins his illustrious career at Duke, which would span a half century. Midstream is a fitting bookend for Price’s remarkable career, and it reinforces his place in the pantheon of American literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Price died of a heart attack before he could complete his memoir, the fourth in a series of autobiographical volumes. A prolific writer and academic, he spent more than five decades teaching at Duke University, his alma mater. The book begins in 1961 as Price, not even 30-years-old, returns to Oxford following his first three years teaching at Duke. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life, is about to be published in the U.S. to considerable praise, setting the writer on the road to literary renown. The book is full of anecdotes about famous figures, including philosopher/author Iris Murdoch, actress Natalie Wood, W.H. Auden, William Faulkner, and even Ronald Reagan, but the most scintillating scene finds the author lunching with mega-couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Rome while they're filming Cleopatra. However, the essence of the writer himself disappears behind these mildly amusing stories. The most poignant pages come when he recounts his mother's death: "Despite the fact that I'd loved her unquestionably more, and longer, than anyone else in my life, I'd just instructed the doctor to permit this body that had made my body more than thirty years ago, and had since dealt with me in boundless generosity, to rush ahead and die." Had Price been able to complete his memoir, perhaps the message would be clear, but as it is, the reader is left wondering why he was writing it at all. Photos.
