[In the following review, Carlson emphasizes the effective realism and emotional intensity of Price's stories. ]

I have become certain of one thing in the last half-year: the rich collection of stories in The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price—the galley copy of which I have absolutely torn apart, used up, wrecked—will exist somewhere as a thread in the fabric of twentieth-century American literature. The fifty stories here were written over the span of almost forty years (though Price notes in his introduction that he wrote exclusively in other forms between 1970 and 1990), and half of them come from his earlier collections, The Names and Faces of Heroes (1963) and Permanent Errors (1970). Price has been known as a "Southern Writer," and these stories for the most part would confirm that in their locale, in the situation of the characters (picking ticks, chewing snuff, eating hominy), and in that thing most often evoked by the name of Faulkner, that is a sense of familial mystery and loss—told in a form which many times overtly addresses its own identity as story. That last is exactly the kind of sentence which tries to bale fifty stories with one piece of wire, and it will not work. That ancient sins and secrets are hot for the characters in these stories, that the characters have a keen sense of regret which roils and simmers within them, an urgent need to testify, a fear of being damned and a stoic wonder for the ways they are redeemed—these may start to make this the book of a southern writer, but there is as much Sherwood Anderson here as Faulkner, and there's another thing throughout the stories, the thing most appreciated perhaps, and that is Reynolds Price's ability to infuse his stories with candor, a simple but powerful sense transcendent fiction has that confronts, invades the reader with the knowledge that if one sits at the table long enough with this writer he's going to show all his cards, unexpected as they may be, and in a beautiful way make something true.

The old word "duty" appears frequently in the stories, family duty—to take in an aging aunt, to be a good father, to pay a visit to a relative, to find the missing inner strength. In fact, there are several stories in which a young man calls on an old woman who used to work for his family. In "The Warrior Princess Ozimba" and "Two Useful Visits," secrets are hinted at, revealed. The latter opens, "Back then your kin could lean down on you with the weight of the world and still not quite say, 'Get yourself up here to see Mary Greet; she's dying fast, and it's your plain duty.'" Both "visit" stories offer the men glimpses of the lost world of the South, and both men are suffused with a kind of gratitude for the care and trust the women have bestowed. These are short stories, the visits almost vignettes, yet news is exchanged and the young men are affected. Throughout the stories, which range in length from two to almost one hundred pages, Price is able to work very well in a small space. Part of this is because of his profound understanding of the scenes he creates and the depth of human potential in each, and part is his ability to marry language and the moment. There are a few stories with the pure lyric reach of prose poems and, of course, there are sections of others which brim with a diction so fluent and apt as to be arresting in themselves. In the last paragraph of "Bess Waters," a story in eight short sections which spans one hundred years, 1863-1963, in the life of the former slave, the title character tries to answer the request of a young visitor (he is named Reynolds Price) to tell her story:

And honest to God, Bess tries to tell it. Her dry lips work and her mind sends words—she only recalls these scattered hours—but what comes out is dark shine and power from her banked old heart and the quick of her bones, dark but hot as a furnace blast with a high blue roar. It burns the boy first. Bess sees him blown back and starting to scorch; then it whips round and folds her into the light till both of them sit in a grate of embers, purified by the tale itself, the visible trace of one long life too hard to tell.

The longest story in the book, "Walking Lessons," is set, surprisingly, in the desert Southwest and begins with one of Price's stunning openers: "My wife killed herself two weeks ago, her twenty-sixth birthday. . . ." In Price's stories, most often people start in trouble, and things get worse. The twenty-eight-year-old writer and college teacher who, deep in fresh grief, flies to see his college friend Blix Cunningham where he works on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, meets a world so dark, troubled, and squalid as to be the physical manifestation of his sorrow. Blix lives in a hovel with an Indian woman, Dora Badonie, whose own maladies rival anybody's. "Walking Lessons" follows the three through a rough mission of mercy, a trek really, that becomes—in its magnitude, calamity, and poor weather—life-threatening. There are, the narrator discovers, no easy answers to the quandaries in which any of them are lost. And with convincing realism of scene and of voice, Price is just that tough-minded as he moves toward the resolution of the story. Redemption isn't something found suddenly on the ground like a coin, but something that breaks imperceptibly into a life like the gradient degrees of dawn. Here, as in many of the stories, the protagonist is a writer, and Price is unafraid of talking like one, breaking frame to be a storyteller and to address the reader. Here, after the travelers are first stranded, their walking lessons begin:

I'm capable of spelling it out for you, in every increasingly pressurized moment—finding stripped howling language to compel your company every step of my way toward agony, physical and mental desperation; but you've read Jack London, you've seen Yukon movies (Preston Foster, Bruce Cabot—eyelashes frosted). May I leave it to you? You have all the elements; build it around me—the night, the struggle.

Elsewhere in the book (frequently, it seems), Price speaks as a storyteller long past the pivotal events, using the accrued gravity of time to add weight and substance to happenings, as in one of my favorites, "The Company of the Dead," a story about two teenage boys who become "setters," those hired to sit up with corpses to keep watch and offer company all the long night before the funeral. Near the start, the narrator says, "By the time Simp and I had our truly wild night—the one I must tell before too late—we were good sized boys, fifteen years old." There is a "must-tell" quality about many of the stories in this collection, as if they were insistent testimonies burning their ways out of a storyteller's heart. "The Company of the Dead" ends with this: "I'm ninety-two years old, writing this line, a man at peace with what he's done and what comes next. I leave this story, in both its parts, as my best gift to a world I've liked and thank, here now, but have never pressed for the black heart's blood of actual love." Parallel passages resound in the stories, "all these many years since" and "Thirteen years on, I tell whoever reads these lines," and this swift, poignant coda which closes "A Full Day":

In four months Buck will die from a growth that reached decisive weight in his body this full afternoon and threw him down. His elder son has made this unreal gift for his father on the eighty-ninth passing of Buck's birthday, though he died these thirty-five years ago.

The effect of this narrative strategy is clear: in a world of such scope, the dead affect the living (one character says about his life that it's like the Bible: there're more ghosts than good women), and the powerful sweep of time in these stories is as real as the weather. Price, in his form and narrative traits, demonstrates the long reach.

Three short pieces lodged a hundred pages apart in the collection are couched as letters from fathers to sons. Each is an emotional tour de force, as the men try to say in writing those essential things that can't be said aloud. "The Last News" is a graphic confession by an alcoholic father of personal crimes he committed long ago. He's not exactly looking for forgiveness, but for something deeper—the paying of a debt. "If you want to kill me once I'm out of here, be my guest," he says, and means it. And listen to the last line, the last word a knife-thrust: "I'm waiting to know your answer, sir." "Breath" is similar, being a brief, brutal history, a request for pardon by a father caught in an ongoing cycle of abuse, and it contains the slight hope that father and son might reconcile, "breathe in the same room." What is remarkable in these stories is how urgent the messages feel, how heartwrenching, how guileless. These are broken men speaking from the depths, and they are what gives so much of Price's fiction an edge that cuts. "A Final Account" shows us a third father, this one writing a letter of gratitude and explanation moments after meeting with his grown son twenty-four years after walking away from his wife and baby. The father is dying of AIDS, alone among strangers, and he says, "Son, you count the most to me of anybody left alive. I knew if I said that straight to your face, blind as I am, I'd just seize up." Writing is the deeper way, these stories show us. The other note that sounds so clearly in this work, in these letters, is that as irremediable as the crimes and as permanent as the regret and as late as the hour may seem, there is still a shred of something to be salvaged.

Sometimes it is a bit of mercy. In "An Evening Meal" Sam Traynor, after five years fighting stomach cancer, has won the battle, and he celebrates his cure by going to dinner at a café. Years before he met and had a brief, intense affair with one of the waiters, who, startingly, is still there. But the surprise of the story comes after the meal when, as he leaves, Sam sees the desiccated shell of one of his first loves, Richard Boileau. The young man hunched in the booth is obviously late in his struggle with AIDS. And the tableau Price leaves us with could have been painted by Hopper: it's dark, and the world is empty, but isn't that a light in the window? This broad summary is a disservice to a delicate story, one of the finest in the collection.

The motif of betrayal figures prominently in the stories of Reynolds Price. "Truth and Lies" is an intense confrontation between Sarah Wilson and her former student Ella Scott, who is sleeping with Sarah's husband, Nathan. The women spend all but two pages of the 5,000-word story closed in Sarah's car. The interview came about because of a note Sarah found in her drunken husband's pocket: "I have got something to tell you and will be on the tracks tonight at eight o'clock." Sarah meets Ella instead and comments, "Well, your writing's improved." From there the interview works through the layers of the Wilsons' marital history and through the pride and hopes of young Ella Scott. Both women come away changed in ways they could not have imagined—and with more resolve. In "Nine Hours Alone," it's the teacher who bears the guilt and the consequences of betrayal. Here Price uses her goodbye letters to tell her secrets. Secrets—regardless of how deep they are buried—will out in Price's world, and once out, they demand reckoning. Once alerted to betrayal, we find the truly human character in the heady and powerful "Serious Need," a fitting title for thirty-six-year-old Jock Pittman's unabashed tale of the way he conducted himself with an old classmate's sixteen-year-old daughter. In that story there is an epiphany (or what I'll call one) in a cemetery that I'm going to teach from here on in, but don't let that diminish your energies toward this story.

There is one Civil War story in this collection. "Endless Mountains" starts with the wound that is the source of every sentence for the thirty pages—and some months—of the story: "The shot went through the white inside of my right thigh on Wednesday near noon." The scavenger who stands over the wounded man a while later rifling his wallet says, "Well, Trump, it's your goddamned birthday." Trump experiences a tormented, half-waking dream brought on by fear of amputation and then by fever. He then flees—such as he can—not sure he isn't dead. The writing here is close and convincing in its delirium and pain as Trump stumbles across a ridge into the mountains. It's really a quest he's on, though he's not sure for what besides survival. The story grows into the metaphoric parallel to "Walking Lessons"; Trump is the damaged soul here, and his descent into pain is intended to cauterize him from the harm war and regret can bring. His "cure" includes one long night wrestling with a naked angel who takes the fever away, a beautiful, frightening scene which is magnified by Trump's stunned and desperate state of mind. His recovery is laden with memory of his own family, and Price describes Trump's courtship in a scene that gets as much out of snow and memory as Joyce. Finally, like the writer-narrator of "Walking Lessons," Trump sees he will go on, must go on, "done with war." These two long stories form a kind of spine for this book; they are poetic and stark examinations of how one might proceed when all is lost.

My favorite stories in the book, however, are those where Price engages early manhood and adolescence. His talent for seeing into the secret heart of men and women is magnificent, but the way he portrays the hot cusp of manhood is unnerving. "The Enormous Door" would be a good story to read first, as it offers a sense of the expectations many of Price's male characters bring to their world. The month the narrator turns twelve, his family moves into a small hotel. "From the word go," he says, "I loved the air of mystery in the building." And there are mysteries, many in his own head. "What are grown men like, truly, in secret?" he wonders. The narrator's desire for a model of manhood (and some quirks in the hotel itself) lead him into a delirious career as a voyeur, spying on his neighbor, a teacher named Simon Fentriss whose magnetism overpowers the boy. Oh, it's a charged time all around, and add to it a purloined copy of Sacred Joy: The Marital Beacon, a four-inch-thick reference book, orange in color, with chapters covering the "beauty" of sexual congress and "The Oral Tradition" and you've got a twelve-yearold in a stew. Then Price, again, turns his story toward a greater place when the things the boy sees in his peeping become genuinely magical, astounding (if that were still an effective word), and lead to the kind of realization Price approaches again and again in his fiction, that is, one not easily captured in a phrase or a moment, but applied instead to the span of life ("As I write this tale, I'm sixty years old . . ."), a larger understanding of love and flesh that wants to elude language forever.

Two other boy/men stories require mention. One is the homage to father-son love, "The Names and Faces of Heroes," which is tender and vast—and encompassed in one long automobile ride home at night. The narrator is nine years old and lies with his head on his driving father's lap. "The short cut to being a man," a minister said to the boy the summer before, "is finding your hero, somebody who is what you are not but need to be." Swimming in the boy's mind are appropriate models: Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, Enos Slaughter. But the lessons of the night will go beyond conventional notions into that region of conscience nine-year-olds own: the terrible responsibility of knowing who will die (this is illustrated again, beautifully, in "A New Stretch of Woods"). "The Names and Faces of Heroes" is one of the best stories of its kind, truly required reading. It does not claim more than it earns.

"Troubled Sleep" is also narrated by a nine-year-old, Edward Rodwell, who spends a hard evening in the secret glen he shares with his unreliable and flashy cousin Falcon Rodwell. Their talk about travel and death is more comic than any we've seen in Price's stories, colored as it is by Falcon's imagination, reminiscent of scenes from Twain. This poignant story explores the thin line between innocence and romance; for Falcon, things are play, but the narrator drinks it all deep:

When we played cowboys, everybody else who had to die died of bullets or arrows, but Falc never died of anything but blood poison or brain fever or milk leg and even then only after he had called me over to where he lay and whispered his Last Will and Testament, leaving me his radio . . . and making me give my oath to bury him in a copper casket and go to Sunday School and church weekly and turn into a great scientist and destroy germs. I would cry and offer to go with him ... thinking to myself, "No radio on earth will ever be what Falcon Rodwell was to me."

Thumbing through this big red book again to type some of the above has further harmed the volume, and soon pages will be loose. There are dozens of stories I have not mentioned which another reviewer might, stories which carry a reader through different doorways of the fine big house I have tried to describe. I have become certain of one thing about these collected stories over the past five months, and that is that I'd rather meet them on my own terms. I wish I'd encountered Price's stories one by one like the many little seasons of a life, but I didn't, and getting them now at once, in such a way that ruined the physical book, well, there's something real about that, believe me. Reynolds Price has assembled a moving book of stories, not an unambitious paragraph in over seven hundred pages. His accomplishment lives. I'm glad to have this book, which will have a rubber band around it for a while, and I plan to do more than this review to share my luck at having had such a noble companion.

The last story in the collection, "An Early Christmas," is a journey by a painter on Christmas Eve into the dark and dangerous labyrinth of modern-day Bethlehem. He finds—by all the evidence—the very place of Christ's birth and emerges to have his life and art changed. The last paragraph of this story, indeed the book, came to me as what Price has been up to in his story writing, a kind of artist's credo. The painter claims "the driving will to show this world its visible likeness, front and back, crown to toe from where I've stood, in the clean new mirrors of honest pictures that mean to be guide lights usably placed in the frequent, sometimes permanent, dark."