This is being presented as Reynolds Price's magnum opus on which
he's spent several years; it is certainly his longest and it could
easily take you a month to read it if you choose to do so. All the
spotty talent of his early works has ceded to tradition - in part
the tradition of the Southern Generational Miscegenational Novel -
along with many of his earlier indelible concerns: the primal myth,
the wish, the dream, the bloodstained memory. Price's characters
are doomed to be bereft at birth. His history of two families
joined and separated in a house "that nurtured [its] miseries" for
two score years laments in an almost uninterrupted fashion the sins
of the fathers and the unendurable sorrows of the mothers from the
time that the grandmother of Eva Kendal died in childbirth and her
husband then took his life. In time, little Eva will grow up to
marry Forrest Mayfield - a marriage which doesn't last longer than
her delivery of Rob, since Forrest goes off to search for his
father, who had been "niggering around," and for the "light
skinned" grandson of one union. "God help you" is the envoi to Rob
when he decides to marry Rachel, and there is a son by that
marriage to carry on his long search for self. Beyond the burden of
pain and secrecy which is handed down from generation to
generation, there are other family "leavings" - particularly the
letters interwoven in the narrative here but also a coinbox, a
doll, a ring, that reifies the everpresent past. . . "it's there in
you. . . it will rise up in time." It does, it does, but will many
people willingly assume the task of "hearing [him] out"? (Kirkus
Reviews)
Published in 1975, The Surface of Earth is the monumental narrative that charts the slow, inextricable twining of the Mayfield and Kendal families. Set in the plain of North Carolina and the coast and hills of Virginia from 1903 to 1944, it chronicles the marriage of Forrest Mayfield and Eva Kendal, the hard birth of their son, Eva's return to her father after her mother's death, and the lives of two succeeding generations.
The Surface of Earth is the work of one of America's supreme masters of fiction, a journey across time and the poignantly evoked America of the first half of our century that explores the mysterious topography of the powers of love, home, and identity. In his evocation of the hungers, defeats, and rewards of individuals in moments of dark solitude and radiant union, Price has created an enduring literary testament to the range of human life.
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