When Reynolds Price died in January 2011, he had completed nearly two-thirds of a projected memoir that begins with his return to England in 1961 and ends in 1965. Price's brother William and one of Price's former Duke University students have turned that manuscript into Midstream. This sizable fragment is a witty and revealing peek into Price's life at a turning point in his prolific career.
During Price's mostly idyllic time at Oxford, he was preoccupied with the publication of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life. He lived and worked among a group of gay writers and academics that included W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
Price excels at brief, sharp glimpses of these literary giants and other luminaries and delightful cameo appearances of an assortment of celebrities. Price shared a lengthy, well-lubricated lunch with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton while the two were filming Cleopatra in Rome. There's a meal with Leontyne Price, brief encounters with Eudora Welty and even Ronald Reagan, gazing at a store window in Beverly Hills one Christmas Day.
Midstream concludes with a moving portrait of Price's mother's final years, a period that marked his return to North Carolina, the purchase of his first house (he'd previously lived in a trailer) and the resumption of his teaching at Duke. In a warm introduction to this work, Anne Tyler, one of his first students, describes Price as "an exclamation point in a landscape of mostly declarative sentences." Reynolds Price, in this lively memoir, provides ample evidence to underscore that assessment. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer