The Source of Light (Paperback, 1st Scribner Pbk. Fiction ed)

Price has narrowed the breadth and time-frame of his last family-saga novel, The Surface of Earth (1975), down to two of that book's later principals: the North Carolina schoolteacher Rob Mayfield and his son Hutchinson. Now it's 1955; Rob, at 51, is dying at a gallop of lung cancer. Hutch, however, after a turn at teaching at a prep school, is antsy, wanting to test himself in the wider world - a fellowship at Oxford, room in which to gauge his fledgling poethood. So off Hutch goes to England, deliberately never told of his father's condition (which had come on fast). The relationship between the two men is complex to begin with. Made motherless at birth, Hutch's demands on still-young Rob did not allow the father to ever re-marry - and now he's dying prematurely; the guilt and obligations, therefore, lie thick on them both. Hutch is also leaving behind Ann Gatlin, a young woman of good sense and near-infinite patience (at first she seems to agree to walt for Hutch indeterminately). Rob soon dies, with great dignity; Hutch, informed by letter (one of many, many letters in the novel), comes back in time to be with his father at the end; he wavers over whether or not to stay afterwards; finally he returns to England, leaving Ann (and a baby begun in her, which she finally, patient no more, disposes of). Price's stylistic burnishments, his rich and decorous and often quite ravishingly affirmative prose, are in large evidence here. So too is his tireless digging for the smallest grace notes of human experience: ancillary characters - women Rob knew, an old black family friend, various young men with whom intensely physical, bisexual Hutch has linked up - are set in with the skilled care of Morandi painting bottles. Yet, all that said, the book will probably make most readers thoroughly uneasy. Hutch's quest for freedom often comes across as predatoriness camouflaged; he's barely likable, less trustable. In dialogue, characters address and answer one another with lozenges of such tooled perfection - sensible, graceful speech - that inarticulateness begins to seem like the deeper truth, not what they're endlessly saying so well. A nimbus of ideality - responsibility, accident, change - is thrown around the book, through which even the most well-intentioned reader may find no passage: a halo made of cast iron. And it weights Price's laudable purpose with an unfortunate load of self-righteousness. (Kirkus Reviews)

Here is the second volume of A Great Circle, the highly acclaimed Mayfield family trilogy, from one of America's literary treasures.

Though a novel independent from The Surface of Earth, The Source of Light continues the saga of the Mayfield family, here focusing on Hutchins Mayfield, whose desire for self-knowledge removes him from his secure existence as a prep school teacher and takes him on a journey to Oxford and Italy to study and write. Hutchins comes back home for a family crisis but ultimately returns to England, where he achieves a maturity that enables him to cope with commitments, abandonments, and the creation of an honest personal agenda.

In The Source of Light, Reynolds Price combines gravity and buoyancy, a mythic sense of the past with the mysteries of place, to forge an encompassing portrait of the strange and various world one travels through in the quest for self-fulfillment.

General

Imprint:	Scribner
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	May 1995
First published:	May 1995
Authors:	Reynolds Price
Dimensions:	203 x 127 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	320
Edition:	1st Scribner Pbk. Fiction ed
ISBN-13:	978-0-684-81338-7
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > Sagas Promotions
LSN:	0-684-81338-6
Barcode:	9780684813387

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