Hag-Ridden

By J.S.

PERMANENT ERRORS by Reynolds Price. 253 pages. Atheneum. $6.50.

In its own modest category--it is the sort of book that writers publish between books--Permanent Errors is worth some moments of respectful attention. Most of the collection is fiction, and Novelist Price (A Long and Happy Life) writes excellent fiction. But the virtues of his present book must be mined from paragraphs which, molded together, unaccountably fail to take on life. The reader moons about admiringly in a boneyard of fizzled epiphanies.

Themes reappear like sweaty dreams: the parting of failed lovers; the suicide, successful in one story, unsuccessful in another, of a young wife.

The failed lovers enter first in a cautious story called "The Happiness of Others." Then Price has another try in a long rumination called "Waiting at Dachau." The story's psychologizing is murky, but it is less neat, less cautious; it will hold more emotion. Nevertheless, after a series of elegies for his parents and a dead friend that seem a bit too private for publication, Price returns to the parting of the lovers in a moody, troubled story, "Good and Bad Dreams," that is the best in the book. This time the lovers are husband and wife, and the parting is deadly; she slashes her arm with a razor and nearly dies. Weeks later he sleeps uneasily beside her. "At the end of his dream he fell or flew. Fall or flight, free or pursued, he could not say which ..." A stinging physical perception ends the story, as the narrator's wife rouses briefly: "She falls to her back, turns on her belly, lays on his bare chest her bare left arm. The scars in the hinge of her arm feed there."

Still Price feels compelled to make one last try at the young husband and the suicidal wife in an awkward novella called "Walking Lessons." But by that time the author seems to have been haunted long enough. The stories are ghosts, perhaps personal, certainly professional, and in the end he may have published them merely to get free.

J.S.

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