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'Roxanna Slade' by Reynolds Price

A novel in the form of a memoir

Sunday, August 16, 1998

By Kathleen George

	Roxanna Slade By Reynolds Price Scribner $25.00

Reynolds Price’s 30th book is a novel in the form of a memoir, a first-person account by Roxanna Slade, who at 94 recalls 74 years of her life.

In this novel with a “voice,” the narrator sets out to describe and reflect upon the better part of this century. There are built-in difficulties with this novel form. Here are a few:

As with biographies, the writer and reader need to collude in setting up the over-arching drama of the life in question.

Like all first-person novels and one-person shows for the theater, a great deal depends on the voice of the narrator. Is it appealing?

And then there is the pressure of the story: Whom is the narrator speaking to? What compels the telling? Why do we like listening?

Are pieces of story promised and withheld naturally, so that while the whole seems effortless, irony and suspense may play their games with us?

The form is more challenging than it appears.

If I do not respond to Roxanna Slade’s voice as much as I wish I could (all the while aware of Price’s skill as an artist), it’s because this character has won me only part way.

I don’t always believe her voice , in the way I don’t always believe in an actor’s performance. In the theater, resistance rises when the actor betrays the moment by signaling something about the character instead of just being.

There are times when Roxanna says things that are not in the flow of the context but that let me know she is spunky, or intelligent, or not-so-perfect and aware of it. Certainly people do this all the time in reality — construct themselves right before our eyes — and in that sense, Roxanna’s self-portraying is a natural thing, a real thing, without being, necessarily, believable.

The memoir form, which appears to be unartificial, is a difficult one because there are things about the artificiality of form that most people love — the shaping of a story, the plumbing of a moment or an event for its full dramatic potential — its combination of rising action, surprise and inevitability.

Roxanna tells her life as a series of events, as time has taught her to remember them. She believes she and her life are fairly ordinary. At 94 and comfortable with herself, she has no present-tense urgency to tell her story. It’s not surprising, then, that at times she and her story ramble.

The reader will need to accept that, slow down, take the story as she gives it — mostly, unaccented.

That said, it is fairly wonderful to be reminded that an ordinary life has so much going on in it and that it turns out to be not ordinary at all. Think of it:

Roxanna was 20 and hardly thinking about love when her beloved younger brother Fernie kidnapped her and took her on an excursion to meet a friend of his, Larkin Slade.

It is clear to the reader that Fernie is himself drawn to Larkin and deals with it by matching his sister to the very appealing boy. It works. Roxanna and Larkin know each other for a few hours, and they fall in love.

Then Fernie challenges Larkin and Larkin’s older brother, Palmer, to a swimming contest. Larkin, trying to keep up with the others, drowns. The death is a terrible shock, but it can receive very little time or attention, because the novel, like life, goes on, and much more will happen to this 20-year-old heroine before she makes it to 94. There is no novel-time for mourning.

Soon Roxanna must decide whether to marry Larkin’s brother, Palmer. And whether to trust him. And how to love him since he behaves strangely. And then how not to be cowed by his strong-willed mother. And then whether to join with her odd mother-in-law in digging out Palmer’s secret life. And so on.

Roxanna’s life moves like a life, full of contradictions and small dramas rather than one single rising action. She adores a person one year, doesn’t the next, almost forgets in some pages what she once obsessed over. The effect is of listening to a 94-year-old who puts a hand up to quell your questions and interruptions, saying, “Slow down, my dear, I’ll tell it my way.”

Roxanna is fond of reminding us how much has changed since the advent of television. She’s quite tart about the tell-all nature of our society, the wish we have to find out how the ordinary human being as well as the mass murderer ticks.

She herself might be one of the more interesting television interviewees, in turns irritating, charming, sympathetic, facile and as wise as any of us gets.

At the end, we’ve heard a Southerner, a woman, a person with no natural racial prejudice, tell about living in the South, in this century, and about struggling with a challenging racial drama in her family. The invisible interviewer, through repeated forays, finds out what decisions Roxanna made along the way, and we measure our own imagined decisions and our own constructed lives against hers.

Kathleen George is a professor of theater at the University of Pittsburgh and a fiction writer.