A Long and Happy Life, by Reynolds Price

A Long and Happy Life
Reynolds Price

This is an interesting piece to write after just having discussed The Probable Future. Since finishing that book on Tuesday, I finished A Long and Happy Life in less than two days. Obviously it’s a quick read (it’s not even 200 pages), but after finishing it, I felt as if I had just read a much longer novel. I mean this as a compliment.

Reynolds Price is a Southern novelist, although I hate to characterize him as such. But like his fellow Southern writers, he shares a lot of their characteristics (such as the extra-long sentence). Usually I am turned off by this technique, but Price’s prose is simply too exquisite to reject it because of such a silly reason.

The plot of A Long and Happy Life focuses on Rosacoke (lord, what a name) Mustian and her love for Wesley Beavers. Hehehe beaver. Ok, seriously. Even though I’ve never really been to the South (well, Hatteras once and Orlando twice, but I’d hardly call either The South) and even though I’m living roughly fifty years after the story takes place, I could really connect to Rosacoke and her misguided love for Wesley. The novel didn’t feel dated at all, another of its strengths.

The narration is third-person, told from Rosacoke’s point of view. I’ve heard it said that A Long and Happy Life is one of the few novels in which an author successfully embodies a character of the opposite sex without seeming false. I must agree, because I never thought that Rosacoke seemed false to me, and I totally forgot that she was written by a man.

(Having taught Tess of the d’Urbervilles, I spend some time on Hardy’s treatment of Tess, and it never fails that several [female] students are outraged because a woman would never act like that! However, I disagree; I strongly believe in Tess as a character, so perhaps I am not the best one to believe when I say I never questioned Rosacoke.)

At any rate, the book began slowly, but I was hooked by the tenth page. The story starts in medias res (in the middle of the action), and it is only gradually that the reader learns important facts about these characters. It makes the beginning of the story somewhat confusing; for example, there are two characters named Sissie and Little Sister, and for a few pages I thought they were the same person, but no. Also the story subtly shifts at times from present to past in that Faulkner-esque way that is also characteristic of Southern writers.

However, it wasn’t very long before I forgot those minor annoyances and let myself enjoy the beauty of the book. Unable to put it down, I finished it quickly and still had time to reread a few parts that I found especially moving. Price has an ability to take even the most mundane of actions and create poetry out of it. Consider exhibit A, Rosacoke watching Wesley dive:

Wesley had run from the bathhouse and taken the high-dive steps three at a time and up-ended down through the air like a mistake at first, rowing with his legs and calling “Milo” as he went (for Milo to laugh), but then his legs rose back in a pause and his arms cut down before him till he was a bare white tree (the air was that clear) long enough for Rosacoke to draw one breath while he went under slow—not a sound, not a drop and what began as a joke for Milo’s sake didn’t end as a joke.

One more example should suffice. Exhibit B, Rosacoke staring up at a hawk:

She took her breath to go, and a light wind in her face brought two things out to meet her—low on the trees a hawk with his tan wings locked to ride the air for hours(if the air would hold and the ground offer things to hunt) and his black eyes surely on her where she stood and clear against the sky, his iron beak, parting and meeting as he wheeled but giving no hawk sound—only shivering pieces of what seemed music riding under him that came and went with the breeze as if it was meant for nothing but the hawk to hear, as if it was made by the day for the hawk to travel with and help his hunting—yet frail and high for a killing bird and so faint and fleeting that Rosacoke strained on her toes to hear it better and cupped her ear, but the hawk saw that and his fine-boned wings met under him in a thrust so long and slow that Rosacoke wondered if they wouldn’t touch her—his wings—and her lips fell open to greet him, but he was leaving, taking the music with him and the wind.

It’s not all like this, by the way. These long pieces of descriptive prose are broken by dialogue and shorter descriptions, depending on the scene.

In a nutshell: A Long and Happy Life is excellent—true literature, it is a beautifully written novel that you won’t regret reading.

Bibliolatry Scale: 5.5 out of 6 stars.