The third in Price's epic Mayfield family saga: an unflinching,
passionate portrayal of a dying son's last days and an elegy for a
great, representative American family. Easily standing on its own,
like The Surface of the Earth (1975) and The Source of Light
(1981), this last of the trilogy focuses on 63-year-old Hutch
Mayfield, an accomplished poet and an English professor at Duke.
Wade, his only child, is ravaged by AIDS, but he doesn't call on
Hutch until he is nearly blind. For the last several years, the son
has been estranged from his parents, living in Manhattan with
Wyatt, a young black man who had forced his lover to choose between
him and the Mayfields - people he considered racists. Infected and
failing himself, though, Wyatt has killed himself, leaving Wade in
the care of Wyatt's overburdened sister. Now, in his son's last
months, Hutch brings Wade back to North Carolina so that he can die
comfortably and perhaps be reconciled with his family. Several
underlying developments, however, complicate matters. Wade's
mother, Ann, left her husband the year before, and now Hutch wants
to shut her out of Wade's death, keeping his son all to himself.
Another burden is the weight of Mayfield history, embodied by a
half-black, 101-year-old cousin with a long memory, and by a white
caretaker, a man who'd been Hutch's lover before he married Ann.
While movingly penetrating the Mayfields' pain, Price boldly
broadens his scope to encompass the stain of America's racial and
sexual histories, weaving in themes of healing, redemption, and
hope. Keen and clear, his elegiac prose is often astonishing in its
direct and resonating power, recalling the most moving passages in
Thomas Wolfe and James Agee while remaining distinctively modern in
its sweep and subject matter. Powerful work that ensures the
transcendence of a singular American voice. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this stunning and fully independent conclusion to A Great Circle, Reynolds Price tells the complex, moving story of a man's return home to die of AIDS and of the unexpected effect that his arrival -- and his death -- has on his family.
Wade Mayfield's parents are separated, but for the remaining months of his life they and their friends come together to care for Wade with the love they can muster. They are unprepared, however, for the astonishing mystery Wade has prepared to reveal once he is gone -- a mystery that initiates the possible reunion of his parents and promises to continue the proud traditions of a complex, multiracial family.
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