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Clear Pictures (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

In 1984, cancer of the spine left Reynolds Price a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair. Thus freed, as he has explained, from many of the exigencies of routine existence (“No responsible citizen ever has the least idea of how much energy leaks away in going to the dry cleaners and catching the bus”), he began to enjoy the most productive period of his career, turning out novels, stories, poems, and plays, among them some of his best work. He did not begin--or even contemplate--this memoir, however, until 1987, when a course in hypnosis and biofeedback to relieve back pain triggered some vivid images from early childhood.

Price’s account of his boyhood and youth in North Carolina focuses on his parents, relatives, caretakers, and teachers, rendered with great affection. It is clear that, even as a boy, he was developing the habits of mind that would serve him well as a novelist, yet he is unfailingly generous to the memory of those who helped him along the way.

Price writes with an innocently oblivious narcissism which can occasionally be exasperating but which serves him well as a memoirist. CLEAR PICTURES--the text is supplemented by evocative photographs, many of them family snapshots, with commentary by Price--belongs on a shelf with Philip Roth’s THE FACTS: A NOVELIST’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY and John Updike’s SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: MEMOIRS. Updike was born in 1932; Roth, like Price, in 1933. Their memoirs, published within the span of a year, offer three fascinatingly different portraits of the novelist as a young man.

Sources for Further Study

Library Journal. CXIV, May 15, 1989, p.68.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, June 4, 1989, p.10.

Newsweek. CXIV, July 17, 1989, p.54.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXV, April 21, 1989, p.73.

Time. CXXXIV, July 10, 1989, p.62.

The Washington Post Book World. XIX, June 18, 1989, p.3.

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