[Solotaroff is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he reviews the development of Price's themes in Permanent Errors.]

In its deeper reaches, Love and Work is a novel about the unconscious and its circuits of love, fear, and punishment—what used to be called God. There is more than a hint of the spiritual in Price, rather like that in E. M. Forster or Rilke, which takes a psychological rather than a theological form: a powerful sense of dark unseen forces and influences that are only partly explained by the description of emotions and that require not just attention but supplication. This preoccupation comes increasingly into the foreground of Permanent Errors, a collection of stories and other pieces that, written over a period of seven years, lead up to and away from the issues of Love and Work.

In a brief, rather cryptic introduction Price tells us that the pieces are joined by a common intention: "the attempt to isolate in a number of lives the central error of act, will, understanding which, once made, has been permanent, incurable, but whose diagnosis and palliation are the hopes of continuance." Most of the errors in the book are committed by writers, who share Eborn's view that a writer needs solitude and detachment as a fish needs water (which happens to be true), but who use this need as a cover for vanity, timidity, selfishness, blindness, and other modes of withdrawal and assault.

There are two, possibly three, main examples. The first is Charles Tamplin, a young American writer living in England, who is involved in four pieces collectively titled "Fool's Education." Tamplin is something of an esthete and a prig who tends to view his experience from a selfprotective literary attitude and to take his knowledge of life from the happiness and the scars of others. But he is not merely foolish: he has a quick, relevant understanding of what he sees, and though it comes too late to profit him in his life, it can, once recognized, accepted, and grieved over, perhaps help to strengthen him in his vocation. His situation is beautifully rendered in the first story ["The Happiness of Others"], which deals with the last day of his long-standing affair with a girl from home, a Rosacoke who has been to Vassar. To Tamplin, it is a day to get through, to kill gracefully and lightly, like the affair itself, and round it to a close. From their failure "to meet, to serve one another, to delight in the work" he will now gain his freedom to make art from it. They visit a favorite church near Oxford and end up trading, rather bitterly, the epitaphs on the tombs. His is an elegy by Ben Jonson for a friend who died young, in which the poet finds consolation in the very brevity of the life:

In small proportions, we just beauty see;
And in short measures, life may perfect be.

Sara's inscription is from a family tomb and speaks of the ties of love under the aspect of death:

And they that lived and loved either
Should die and lie and sleep together.
Go reader. Whether go or stay,
Thou must not hence be long away.

"It's a truer poem," she says. "It could change whole lives." Tamplin is unimpressed. A short while later their car almost collides with a flock of sheep. A young shepherd follows them, apparently just awakened, refreshes himself with a last patch of snow, and calmly says, "Sorry." It is enough to light up Sara, who smiles and waves him pardon. A few small images of life's transience, but enough to make Tamplin realize that Sara will recover in ways he won't—or only enough to write truly about the burden of this day.

Tamplin's pitfalls and recognitions deepen as his chronicle moves along. He is a young man in flight, one foot out the door of any entangling relationship, ready to pull the door of his privacy shut at any sign of invasion. He closes it on a desperate woman who wants to use his bed to steal a few moments of love, but he ends up worshiping the bitter mysteries of her love-scarred life. For there is a stern beneficence operating in his fate that drives him out of his shell, turns his timidity to a certain kind of strength, leads him, some years later, to abandon his stiff-necked pride and ask forgiveness for not forgiving Sara's rightful distrust of him.

This difficult movement from grievance to grief surges powerfully through the last two stories in the book, which deal with an older writer, not unlike Tamplin, whose wife first attempts and then commits suicide. "Good and Bad Dreams" is an extraordinary tracing of the borderland of the conscious and the unconscious that lies between a husband and a wife who have reached a terrible ultimate stage, in which her life hangs in the balance of their love/hate, but who can only communicate in their sleep.

"Walking Lessons," a long story, picks up the husband's legacy of rage after her death and takes him to an Indian reservation and to certain ordeals that his wife's act has reserved for him. The theme of an intolerable but seemingly unbreakable connection is doubled by the situation of the friend he visits there, a lapsed medical student who has a hopeless job as a VISTA worker and a more hopeless relationship with an Indian girl with multiple sclerosis. To Dora and the other Indians, the writer is a new affliction, the husband of a suicide, whose ghost, according to their lore, will follow him by night. To his friend, Blix, he is an unfeeling monster, "the killing kind." I won't try to trace the complex movement of this story or its mystical undertow, by which the writer is dragged to the admission of his responsibility, then to his atonement for it. I suspect that "Walking Lessons" brings to an end a long, grueling phase in Price's career, deeply though not congruently related to his own moral accounting, and bearing in its searching, potent artistry the healed scars of his own suffering.