New Mockingbird

A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE (195 pp.)--Reynolds Price--Atheneum ($3.95).

One of the pleasing vagaries of the publishing business is that every year or so a good novel takes hold of public fancy and lodges near the top of the bestseller lists for month after month. Suburban matrons feel socially inadequate until they have read it, a Hollywood movie producer pays the price of a California divorce settlement for film rights and assigns a subordinate to read what he has paid for, and a women's magazine commissions the newly celebrated author to write 10,000 words at $2 each on the secret of happy marriage.

The result is that the right books are sometimes read, often for what seem to be the wrong reasons: artful publicity, blind luck, a nagging cultural conscience that periodically requires the public to atone for reading several Chapman Reports by acknowledging one To Kill a Mockingbird. Whatever the reasons, the book world almost certainly is about to see the fascinating process begin again with A Long and Happy Life, the first novel of a 29-year-old North Carolinian now living in Oxford, England: Reynolds Price.

Launched in a flurry of prepublication testimonials and press attention (Harper's magazine will devote most of its April issue to printing the entire novel), Author Price's book is a brief, appealing, generally unpretentious tale of a young girl who does not quite know how to land her laggard suitor, and who, as she learns, finds error a trial. It is a good first novel, masterfully put together, and it deserves its jackpot luck, wrong reasons notwithstanding.

Patent Infringed. The book's only egregious fault is its beginning: there, the author salaams toward Oxford, Miss., as almost every new Southern writer has done for two decades. The first several pages describe the ride of the poor-white heroine, Rosacoke Mustian, as she bumps on the back of Wesley Beavers' motorcycle toward the funeral of a Negro friend. "Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles toward Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody's face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl . . ." There is nothing wrong with this, or with the other two-thirds of the sentence still to come, except that Faulkner holds the patent.

But surprisingly, the sentences soon lose their short-story-class sterility, and become tauter and fresher. Before long, Price is writing his own wry, amusing novel, and doing it well. Rosacoke is a likable, skillfully drawn character--young and gangly-pretty, bright enough to see the sour humor in being, as she is, a good girl.

Wesley has courted her for six years, between stretches of billygoating with anybody else who was available. But he seems more interested in his motorcycle than in Rosacoke, and marriage clearly has not crossed his mind. Brother Milo, with laughter that is not meant to be cruel, bawdily recites a solution: "Pull up your petticoat, pull down your drawers . . ." But Rosacoke remembers that her Negro friend Mildred died bearing a bastard. Still, the wages of virtue are not buying much; if Rosacoke does not marry Wesley, whom she is almost certain she loves, there is little for her to do except keep on working for the telephone company and watch while her sister-in-law hatches babies.

Pulling Hard. The honesty and art of Price's telling make "should she or shouldn't she" seem a new, agonizing problem--as it usually is in life and seldom is in novels. The reader may have a few reservations; after Rosacoke takes Brother Milo's advice, for instance, Author Price applies Victorian literature's doctrine of immediate conception. And although his observations are intended to be Rosacoke's, Price sometimes betrays a man's melodramatic uneasiness at the workings of women: a nursing baby is described as "pulling hard at the life" of a perfectly healthy mother. But the objections are trifling, and even the opening bow toward Faulkner does not mar A Long and Happy Life seriously. The working-out of Rosacoke's young womanhood is touching and true.

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