Contesting the Female Stereotypes

Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price (Atheneum: $17.95)

Reynolds Price not only believes that literature should transcend gender but proves the point in his novels by lavishing meticulous attention upon his female characters, entering so thoroughly into their minds and hearts that the question never arises. His first book, “A Long and Happy Life,” belonged almost entirely to the spirited heroine Rosacoke Mustian, and each of the novels and stories following that stunning debut have been enlivened by unforgettable female protagonists. “Kate Vaiden” is the ultimate extension of Price’s thesis, a first-person-singular novel written as the autobiography of a woman coming of age in the South during the Depression and war years.

In a statement about this new book, Price says: “I’ve increasingly felt the tyranny of an insistence by both male and female partisans . . . that a man cannot ‘understand’ a woman and vice versa.” In his one-man crusade to demolish that narrow view, he has created a character who not only embodies attitudes of her sex and generation but the frailties and strengths shared by everyone. The result, as the author intended it, is “a sustained look at one human hero.” Kate Vaiden’s voice is unmistakable, remarkable at a time when the characters in contemporary novels often seem as transferable as middle-management personnel.

Example of Individualism

Independent and candid, Kate is a supreme example of individualism, defined by time, place and gender but continually exceeding, escaping--and evading--those limitations. Kate is no paragon of virtue, as she herself would coolly admit. There are voids in her personality--inconsistency, willfulness, a reluctance to establish fundamental human connections. When her young parents die in an inexplicable murder-suicide, her reaction seems considerably less intense than one might expect from a doubly bereaved 11-year-old. Adopted and brought up by a loving aunt and a mercurial but decent uncle, she thrives in the tiny Carolina town where they live, drawing sustenance from everyone around her but always keeping an essential distance.

Reading this novel, we realize how vital a force regionalism can be in fiction; the extent to which a specific location can illuminate and enhance otherwise ordinary incidents and humdrum lives. Kate is formed and molded by the village of Macon; every aspect of the town contributes to the development of her character. “Kate Vaiden” takes place just before American speech became homogenized by television, before the landscape was bulldozed into an anonymous strip of franchised food outlets and strip malls. The language still retains a distinctly Southern cadence, the images drawn from direct observation of daily life.

Private Stock of Expressions

Church music “has no more tune than a hinge”; two black women at a bus stop seem “handsome as orchids,” a person can get “tired as a wheel.” Each character has a private stock of such expressions--a tone, style and rhythm of his own. You always know exactly where you are and who is speaking in this novel; the differentiation is consistent and absolute, as it must be in a book almost entirely dependent upon the interaction of personality.

Since Price is dealing with a life, not a plot, structure emerges only as pivotal events accumulate. Looking backward at 57, Kate remembers incidents, retelling no more than she knew at the time, the unsolved mysteries creating a natural suspense. As she grows up, forming and abandoning emotional attachments with lovers, relatives and finally her own infant son, the delayed impact of her parents’ death becomes astonishingly clear, central to her story. For all her apparent resilience, Kate has never recovered from that deprivation, and she’s destined to re-enact it time and again.

Developed subtly and gradually, the pattern of an individual woman’s life becomes a contemporary American odyssey, surmounting distinctions of circumstance as well as sex to achieve the author’s ambitious plan. In this extraordinary tour de force, Price has managed to make the gender of his hero incidental to the narrative.