Volume 33, Number 14 · September 25, 1986
Ways Down South
By Robert Towers
Kate Vaiden
by Reynolds Price
Atheneum, 306 pp., $16.95
A Summons to Memphis
by Peter Taylor
Knopf, 224 pp., $15.95
Kate Vaiden is Reynolds Price's sixth novel, and it has already renewed interest in a writer whose career had a strong beginning (A Long and Happy Life, A Generous Man) but then seemed to sag under the weight of several honorable, talkative, but less than gripping novels. As Price informs us in a prepublication note from his publisher, he has identified two sources from which his new work arose. One was the need to write a story that would have a direct relationship—'at whatever imaginative distance'—to his own curiosities about the past of his dead mother, who had been orphaned at an early age. The other was a wish to confront the tyrannical dictum of feminists 'that members of a gender may not function with any security outside that gender's narrow mental and physical confines—a man cannot 'understand' a woman and vice versa.'
Review, 3425 words
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