The Good Priest's Son
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Reynolds Price, one of America's most distinguished and honored writers, has produced such masterpieces as Noble Norfleet, Roxanna Slade, and Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now in The Good Priest's Son, his fourteenth novel and thirty-sixth book, Price gives us another penetrating study -- full-length portraits of five arresting characters.
On September 11, 2001, Mabry Kincaid -- a fiftyish art conservator -- is flying home after a much-needed rest in Rome and Paris. Halfway across the Atlantic, his plane is diverted from New York to Nova Scotia. Two days later, when the United States has recovered sufficiently from the attack on the World Trade Center, Mabry discovers that his downtown New York loft is uninhabitable. He flies south to North Carolina instead to visit his aged father. A widowed Episcopal priest, Tasker Kincaid has been injured in a recent fall and is cared for by live-in Audrey Thornton, an African-American divinity student at Duke University, and her grown son, Marcus, an ambitious painter. During a week in North Carolina -- with help from his cantankerous father, from Audrey and Marcus and from Gwyn Williams, an old flame -- Mabry is compelled to explore his tormented relationship with his father and with a world that still harbors much that he's loved but has long since abandoned.
On his return to New York -- and in a swift and unexpected return to the south -- Mabry must deal with the near-ruin of his loft, with haunting memories of his infidelities to his recently deceased wife, with the end of his childhood family, the uncertainty of his professional career, the ambivalence of his adult daughter, and with a daunting likelihood that is terrifyingly at work inside his body.
Reynolds Price writes at peak form in this lean and masterful, comic yet profoundly moving novel -- one that unfolds the stages of one man's hope for ransom in old familiar worlds that are now forever changed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The events of 9/11 serve as a catalyst for reconciliation between Mabry Kincaid, a 53-year-old Manhattan art conservator, and his father, Tasker, an Episcopal priest, in Price's 14th novel, a nuanced, quietly evocative story set in North Carolina. Mabry, who was on a cross-Atlantic flight during the attacks on the World Trade Center, decides to go to his father's home in North Carolina rather than return to his uninhabitable downtown New York apartment. In his boyhood home he finds Audrey Thornton, a golden-eyed, 4o-something African-American woman providing companionship (she's a Duke divinity student) and care for Mabry's wheelchair-bound father. Mabry's visit becomes an extended stay, and over the course of the leisurely narrative, Price (Roxanna Slade, etc.) chronicles Mabry's tentative friendship with Audrey and her son and develops Mabry's difficult father-son relationship; the novel blossoms into a heartfelt study of thorny familial love. Price also poignantly renders the exigencies of Mabry's middle age: Mabry takes up with an old flame while coming to terms with his philandering past, the death of his wife from cancer and the debilitating onset of multiple sclerosis. His discovery of a Van Gogh oil sketch also livens the story, but it is Price's assured prose and fully imagined characters and their family ties that make this emotionally resonant novel compelling.