12/18/02
Tangled plot and loose ends betray Price’s familiar style
By Jeff Minick
Noble Norfleet by Reynolds Price.
Schribner, 2002. $26 — 307 pp.
While
living in Boston in the mid 1970s, I read The Surface Of Earth by
Reynolds Price. That massive book not only struck me as a wonderful
piece of fiction, but also made me acutely homesick for North Carolina
as well. Price, it seemed to me, had more than any other writer the
knack of creating speech as reflected in a particular region, in this
case North Carolina. I could quite literally hear the characters of
that marvelous book speaking as I read.Since then, I have read probably a half dozen more of Price’s books, all fiction except for a few essays. Though I have not enjoyed these books quite as much as The Surface Of Earth — I suspect this diminishment has less to do with the author than with my subsequent move back to the South, where I did not need his fiction so much to take me home again — I have nonetheless always commenced a new Reynolds Price book with a sense of anticipation and concluded with a sense of satisfaction.
Yet in reading Noble Norfleet, Price’s latest novel, my anticipation slowly gave way to a sense of bafflement and of frustration, and by the time I finished the book I felt like breaking into a chorus of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
When we begin this book, we find that a young man named Noble Norfleet, having spent a portion of an evening making love with one of his high school teachers, wakes the next morning to find that his crazed mother has murdered his younger brother and sister in their beds. After the funeral of his siblings, Noble finds himself caught up in a web of relationships: an affair with his Spanish teacher; a deepened sense of debt to the black woman who helped him through the tough times of his childhood; an involvement with a minister in town.
Later Noble, finding himself constrained by the watchful eyes of the small community, joins the Army and serves in Vietnam as a medic. There he undergoes a sort of cathartic vision while seeking out a wounded soldier in the tunnels built by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. Noble lives through both the vision and the tunnels, and returns home to the United States to become a civilian nurse.
The rest of the book describes his attempts to find a place for himself in the world and to confront the loneliness that seems to be his lot in life. After many years, a renewed contact with his mother, who is still alive and confined in the prison mental asylum, and who is now due for release, reveals to Noble that side of his life which he has so long avoided and yet which he has also spent so much time seeking.
What frustrated me about Price’s book was its own confused tangle of philosophies. Having read some of Price’s wise essays, for example, I found his religious meditations in this book silly and saccharine. In a scene between Noble and Tom, the minister, we have an exchange that is indicative of much of this religious philosophy. Tom, who has just finished making love to Noble, asks him if he’s ever been worshipped before. When Nobel tells him “No sir,” Tom says:
“That’s what I gave you then. The bare human body is
the altar of God on this Earth at least. That’s all I meant
to teach you. Take it with you when you go on into this world. Almost
nobody knows it or believes it anyhow. It ought to be taught from
every pulpit every Sunday forever, every synagogue and temple on
the whole planet Earth; but of course anybody who taught it would
be burned.”
There is evidence that Noble later repudiates Tom’s philosophy,
yet in other parts of the book other philosophies of sex and sexuality
appear without making any sense. Price tells us several times that
Noble worships women, yet he spends most of his time with women
in massage parlors. Noble also oftentimes seems incoherent around
women — perhaps that is Noble’s attraction to women,
for he seems to have few others for a man whom women desire to bed
so frequently — and his incomprehension regarding people and
events around him is often passed to the reader. Why, for example,
does Tom, who is married, the husband of a lovely wife and the father
of lovely children, a man who is also dying, decide to take Noble
as a lover? Why does no one in the town look askance on Noble’s
trip with his teacher to pick up his mother’s abandoned car?
Why does Hesta seem to despise Noble at times? What was the point
of the vision in the cave? Did it happen? Is there some metaphor
we’re missing? Why doesn’t Noble grieve more for his brother
and sister?
Books that raise questions, that challenge the reader to look at
something in a different light, are both delights and challenges
to read. Noble Norfleet, however, seems a knotted conglomeration
of ideas that not even the most tedious explication will sort out.
(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)