The Good Priest's Son

Reynolds Price, one of America's most distinguished and honored writers, has produced such masterpieces as Noble Norfleet, Roxanna Slade, and Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now in The Good Priest's Son, his fourteenth novel and thirty-sixth book, Price gives us another penetrating study — full-length portraits of five arresting characters.

On September 11, 2001, Mabry Kincaid — a fiftyish art conservator — is flying home after a much-needed rest in Rome and Paris. Halfway across the Atlantic, his plane is diverted from New York to Nova Scotia. Two days later, when the United States has recovered sufficiently from the attack on the World Trade Center, Mabry discovers that his downtown New York loft is uninhabitable. He flies south to North Carolina instead to visit his aged father. A widowed Episcopal priest, Tasker Kincaid has been injured in a recent fall and is cared for by live-in Audrey Thornton, an African-American divinity student at Duke University, and her grown son, Marcus, an ambitious painter. During a week in North Carolina — with help from his cantankerous father, from Audrey and Marcus and from Gwyn Williams, an old flame — Mabry is compelled to explore his tormented relationship with his father and with a world that still harbors much that he's loved but has long since abandoned.

On his return to New York — and in a swift and unexpected return to the south — Mabry must deal with the near-ruin of his loft, with haunting memories of his infidelities to his recently deceased wife, with the end of his childhood family, the uncertainty of his professional career, the ambivalence of his adult daughter, and with a daunting likelihood that is terrifyingly at work inside his body.

Reynolds Price writes at peak form in this lean and masterful, comic yet profoundly moving novel — one that unfolds the stages of one man's hope for ransom in old familiar worlds that are now forever changed.

"The events of 9/11 serve as a catalyst for reconciliation between Mabry Kincaid, a 53-year-old Manhattan art conservator, and his father, Tasker, an Episcopal priest, in Price's 14th novel, a nuanced, quietly evocative story set in North Carolina. Mabry, who was on a cross-Atlantic flight during the attacks on the World Trade Center, decides to go to his father's home in North Carolina rather than return to his uninhabitable downtown New York apartment. In his boyhood home he finds Audrey Thornton, a golden-eyed, 40-something African-American woman providing companionship (she's a Duke divinity student) and care for Mabry's wheelchair-bound father. Mabry's visit becomes an extended stay, and over the course of the leisurely narrative, Price (Roxanna Slade, etc.) chronicles Mabry's tentative friendship with Audrey and her son and develops Mabry's difficult father-son relationship; the novel blossoms into a heartfelt study of thorny familial love. Price also poignantly renders the exigencies of Mabry's middle age: Mabry takes up with an old flame while coming to terms with his philandering past, the death of his wife from cancer and the debilitating onset of multiple sclerosis. His discovery of a Van Gogh oil sketch also livens the story, but it is Price's assured prose and fully imagined characters and their family ties that make this emotionally resonant novel compelling. Agent, Harriet Wasserman. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"As in much of Price's other fiction, questions of love and death dominate and drive strong, unconventional characters in a thoughtful novel notable for a solid sense of place and authentic regional speech. Recommended..." Library Journal

"For all its incidental charms, one of Price's lesser novels, scattered and indecisive." Kirkus Reviews

"[U]nconvincing....The 9/11 aspect seems, indeed, only a manufactured feature. Price is avidly read, however, and library patrons with an interest in serious fiction will certainly be asking for his latest." Booklist

"Reynolds Price has done it again. When you read The Good Priest's Son — you want it never to end — you will celebrate the quiet artistry of its creation. A major work from one of our greatest novelists, its people will stay with you always." Harper Lee

"Writing with depth and sustained honesty about the life of an ordinary American man in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, Reynolds Price gives us an enormous gift: a way to see and understand our own selves in a world forever changed. The Good Priest's Son is a masterful novel that explores the complexities of family, the impact of history, and our most ordinary vulnerabilities. Clearly, Reynolds Price is one of the great storytellers and writers of our time." Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Mermaid Chair and The Secret Life of Bees

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English. Fifty of his short stories, ranging from his first work in the early 1950s to the early 1990s, were published in his Collected Stories in 1993. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life, was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award. His sixth novel, Kate Vaiden, was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Six of the novels take their places in separate trilogies concerned with two families — the Mustians of eastern North Carolina and the Mayfields of North Carolina and the mountains of Virginia. Among his other volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; his work has been translated into seventeen languages.