This is the second book in which Reynolds Price speaks
convincingly in a woman’s voice. The first, Kate Vaiden (1986),
won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Roxanna Slade, Price
again creates a memorable character — direct, unsentimental,
and no-nonsense.
Roxanna Slade tells her life story from the vantage point of her 90s.
She was born with the 20th century in small-town North Carolina and
never moves far; the story of the modern South and the legacy of
slavery parallel Roxanna’s own tale. Roxanna thinks her life
has been ordinary, like most people’s: “Very few
human beings of any sex or background are called to anything grander
than dinner.” Only five or ten moments matter in most any one
life, she says, and she sets out to speak honestly about her
significant moments.
Roxanna begins her story on her 20th birthday, when she met, fell in
love with, and watched a young man drown within the space of an
afternoon. Then she married his older brother. She coped with an
intimidating mother-in-law, her husband’s infidelity with a
black woman, the loss of an infant, years-long debilitating depression,
her husband’s premature death, and the discovery that he
fathered a daughter with the other woman. Despite all this, Roxanna
Slade is an uplifting book. Roxanna believes her life has had purpose
in loving her family members, in her belief in God and an afterlife
(though she doesn’t hold much by any church), in the living
itself.
Loss of loved ones, illness, marital stresses: Roxanna observes that
what happened to her happens to everyone. But her manner of speaking
and observations aren’t ordinary. In Roxanna Slade, Reynolds
Price has given readers an extraordinary companion.
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