The Names and Faces of Heroes looks [to be] dividing opinion as sharply as Mr. Reynolds Price's first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Is his writing just dilute Faulkner, adrip with Southern charm, hinting at religious profundities, flabby and commercial, or is it, as I believe, the work of a mind sufficiently independent not to avoid material because other writers may have used it for banalities? In I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism he reports an experiment in which he gave a class a poem of Lawrence's without any indication of the author. Because it was set in a cosy, lamplit family atmosphere with a piano, many of the comments were derisive, "Pears Annual, " "Sentimental." etc. I feel something of the same stock response is blocking appreciation of the originality and force with which Mr. Price examines his particular patch of earth. It is true that in other books one finds North Carolina, ageing negroes, poor whites and, come to that, religion. What matters is that they are explored with an individual eye which sees everything freshly so that the ageing negroes are people, as distinguishable from other ageing negroes as Chardin's apples are from other apples. It is possible that in time Mr. Price may become just another Southern dollar-spinner; the point is that he isn't now, and that guilt-by-association isn't criticism. When I read the opening story, "A Chain of Love," in Encounter I felt I was going to remember it for the rest of my life. Of course, vivid memories are not always a test of merit. Good tosh can be vivid, must be. But what I remembered about the story of the girl taking her grandfather to die in hospital—it is the girl who is the heroine of A Long and Happy Life—was not just the freshness and the compassion; it was the obstinacy with which it did not take the easy way, even at the risk of having reviewers assume that it did.