Countless stories lie in the rubble of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Reynolds Price uses the destruction as a backdrop for a tale of a prodigal’s return home in “The Good Priest’s Son.”
Mabry Kincaid is on a flight from Paris to New York on Sept. 11, 2001. The first he hears of the disaster is when the pilot announces that the flight is being rerouted. Once on the ground, he ascertains the safety of his daughter, who also lives in New York. He figures that his apartment, several blocks from ground zero, is uninhabitable. His last call is to his ailing father, who lives in the family home in North Carolina.
The relationship between Mabry and Tasker, his father, is a contentious one. Mabry, a 53-year-old art conservator and the only living son, has never lived up to his father’s expectations. After the phone call, in which his father invites him to return home,he lists the salient aspects of his present life under the title “A Catalog of Loss and Failure.” In it is the death of his estranged wife, neurological problems that are quite likely multiple sclerosis, his rejection of his father, rejection of him by his daughter and his destroyed home. He is left with few choices. Pushed by the fear that his father may soon die, he heads to North Carolina when the planes return to the air.
He arrives at the family home to find his father in the care of Audrey Thornton and her son, Marcus, both blacks descended from earlier family retainers. Mabry attempts, and somewhat succeeds, at reconnecting.
His task is difficult, though, because he’s a character who is unable to garner much sympathy, not from the people he meets and not from the reader. He is impossibly self-absorbed. He catalogs the affairs that ultimately led to the failure of his marriage, and seems to find little guilt in the money his wealthy, estranged wife saw fit to leave him. He is unable to get past his father’s love for Mabry’s long-dead brother. He’s at least as prickly as his father, though it’s easier to forgive a certain shortness in a man who is 80 and wheelchair bound.
The events of 9/11 fade into the background as Mabry founders. Price uses a couple of subplots to move the story along, one having to do with relationships between the blacks and whites in the story, another having to do with a painting Mabry is carrying and a now presumably dead client. The need to connect with the client, along with doctor appointments, draw Mabry back to New York. Tragedy has softened Mabry’s daughter, and one hopes it might work its magic on Mabry as well.
Cataloging the reasons that Mabry is so trying would easily fill an evening’s discussion. There is no rule that says fiction has to be pretty or pleasant, and often the rocky journeys can be the most revealing and, ultimately, satisfying.
But “The Good Priest’s Son” is not redeemed by Price’s convincing and moving pictures of small-town Southern life, nor by prose both clear and lovely.
The book’s finale, like its central character, is weak. Price is a much-respected author, and the reader would be better-
served by returning to one of his many earlier works.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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The Good Priest’s Son
By Reynolds Price
Scribner, 278 pages, $26
