"A Kate Vaiden" is Reynolds Price's sixth novel, and it has already drawn interest from a writer whose career had a strong start (with works like "A Long and Happy Life," a great man) renewed, but then seemed to falter under the weight of several honorable yet less gripping novels. In a pre-publication note from his publisher, Price informs us that he has identified two sources from which his new work has emerged. One was the need to write a story with a direct relationship—without any imaginative distance—to his own curiosities about the past of his deceased mother, who became an orphan at an early age. The other was a desire to confront the tyrannical dictum of feminists: "that members of one sex cannot assuredly step outside the narrow mental and physical boundaries of that sex; a man cannot understand a woman and vice versa."
The beginning orphanage plays a central role in the story of Kate Vaiden, though Price informs us that this True Religion bears little resemblance to the events of his mother's life. Moreover, the storytelling in the first person for Price (who has always been a staunch advocate, so to speak, for the women in his novels) represents a lasting achievement in shifting female identities, going beyond mere mimicry to a sympathetic identification with every turning point in his heroine’s very distinctive voice and each twist and turn of her erratic course. The effect of these identity shifts is vividness and liveliness in the narrative and events.
The time setting of the novel spans from the late 1920s to the present, as Kate—a genuine middle-class white woman who has held on with strong eyes and teeth for 57 years—sets out to write her improbable story. The setting is a northern-central North Carolina town and countryside, with an extended interlude in Norfolk, Virginia, during World War II. After a childhood that was "normal as tap water, up to a point," Kate, at the age of eleven, becomes abruptly and violently orphaned when her fugitive young father, Dan, murders her mother, Frances Timberland, and then kills himself at the cemetery where a cousin of Frances’ had just been buried. The circumstances are mysterious; we only learn that another cousin, Swift, was somehow involved.
Kate, who is bright, an avid reader, and a great talker, is taken in by her much older sister Caroline, a stoic and kind-hearted woman who had raised Frances when their parents died early. Caroline gives Kate a good home in the small rural village of Macon, alongside Aunt Holt and a young black cook, Noony, who quickly becomes Kate's confidante and advisor.
The child's grief for her beloved parents seems brief, almost fleeting, and soon she adjusts to her new life. Attentive and quick-tongued, Kate gives us a child’s-eye view of what it was like to live in that time and place:
"First, it wasn't... tiny-at-all."
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