Tongues of Angels

by Reynolds Price

Book Overview

"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try."
Set in a summer camp in the Blue...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 074320221X
• ISBN13: 9780743202213
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Beautifully Written, but An Uneven Character - Maybe

Reynolds Price, without doubt, is a prose master, one of those writers who "says much by saying little." And there is little to fault in the simple, rhythmic, almost elegiac style he chooses to color the relationship between a young camp counselor (who narrates the story as on older man) and Rafe, the "golden boy" of the camp where he is employed. Not a vast amount of time is spent on character development, in my opinion, but given the prose style, that was likely a very wise decision since it allows the reader to react "in his own mind" to the story of Boatner and Rafe without the intrusion of needless detail. And since the setting - summer camp - is so familiar to many, it certainly allows a broad swathe of readers to intimately relate, perhaps, their own experiences. The only thing I found questionable, however, was the character of Rafe. I can easily see Boatner in middle age, contemplating the meager successes and failures of his life, as looking to the past through golden eyed glasses. But the "perfection" of the boy, Rafe, is almost jarring. Perhaps this is what Price intended. Perhaps Rafe is the "angel" of the title, either in reality or through the eyes of a middle-aged narrator desperate to find some beauty and truth in his past to alleviate the pain of "now." But, the fact remains, Rafe is just "too much" by way of perfection to the point where the reader simply stops caring, knowing that the child is somehow infallible. At once point, when the child, for example, is bitten by a snake, I actually found myself wondering aloud - "I am surprised that poison has any effect on him." Still, as mis-steps go, it's a minor one. Fundamentally brief, beautifully rendered, "Toungues of Angels" would be a superb book for a late teen, a creative writing student, or for an adult reader who appreciates fine writing in familiar shoes. Recommend.

a novel about healing

Told in retrospect, an older man's epiphany, this is a tale beyond coming-of-age, where a twenty-one-year-old camp art counselor first becomes aware of a healing path which has been opened for him. It takes a lifetime of experience and reflection to fully accept responsibility for his journey, to understand the need to be healed, and to realize how the path, now perhaps less arduous, will continue to challenge and nurture him long after the catalytic events, their time and place, have lost all presence but that seared in his heart. The story is of the chaste friendship between the art counselor and a charismatic, gifted boy with a traumatic past and a foreboding future. As the reluctant tutor seeks to channel the glint of promise he senses in his unpredictable, willful ward, he is forced to confront his own talent, feelings, and perspective. Unknowingly and subtly, ward becomes tutor, not in overt, controlling ways, but as mirror, spiritual twin, unwitting angel. This interaction constitutes the body of the work, and anchors the subtextual meditations about art, mysticism, generosity, and understanding with which the keen, sensitive mind of the then counselor would thereafter struggle, so as to become true to himself and one with life. These are no mere conceptual musings, but disquieting thoughts that question accepted values, the stirring of moral and aesthetic passions which revolt at what is false, at what contradicts the inner self, and demand action. For an artist it translates as the self-justified need to express in one way and not any other. The battleground is mundane: heart and mind engaged in the daily course of living, at summer camp or elsewhere. Mr. Price lays all out soberly, with language that is never labored, precious or pretentious. The scope of the work remains intimate, the insights acute and immediately relevant. The counselor's interior struggle becomes our own as the narrative focuses on probing the self as it reaches out for love. Indeed a path begins to emerge as we witness, through the tale, the dynamics of healing: living, thinking about our lives, taking in and letting go, allowing the synergy to propel. Without Mr. Price's disciplined execution, this work could have been an inflated horror. Which is to say: the basic dramatic situation is recognizably stock. But Mr. Price's art, like truth, is great, and resides in the modifiers. As one reads, the novel keeps surprising by being "better" than somehow one anticipates; it builds to genuine exhilaration. The humor is serious, the tone that of a thoughtful man looking back so as to keep moving safely forward. There is tragedy, perhaps self-fulfilling, but of the sort that anoints. Paradoxically, it feels less than total: part of its finality is to keep on nurturing. "What might have been" is shown to be truly irrelevant. To the extent that there is such a thing as destiny, one is satisfied that each character has fulfilled his own. There has been no sacrifice. Fulfil