Discussion of Reynolds Price's The Good Priest's Son starting on April 8, 2007.

I think that one thing "The Good Priest’s Son" did was comment on our ongoing question: Who has the right to talk/write about 9/11? On page 213, the narrator thinks “By then they all knew that Miles had prior rights here.” Because Miles had lost his boss, he had “prior rights” on the subject, even though Malc was working at ground zero and Charlotte and Mabry were both from NYC.

Also – the novel does, like other novels we’ve read (and will read), highlight the importance of guilt/shame in a character’s life. Mabry is guilty/ashamed (we can have the battle about the differences between guilt and shame in another post – for now, I’ll inappropriately collapse them) about many things: his treatment of his wife and his relationships with Charlotte and his father. I think this “guilt” is the most important theme of post-9/11 fiction and, even though I did not really like the novel, I appreciated Price’s thematic elements and adherence (?) to the genre.

The novel also dealt with ideas of “infection.” There was the father’s sickness, the inhalation of the dust &c. at Ground Zero, and, most importantly, Mabry’s own possible illness. I think this novel could really be about Mabry searching for someone to take care of him – which is another theme of this post-9/11 genre.

I found Reynolds Price’s book, The Good Priest’s Son, was very dry and uninteresting. I really do not understand why Harper Lee recommended this book (at least on my copy). Again, I had a problem with the grammar, except this time instead of an uneducated East End of London woman, it was American Southerners who do not conjugate their verbs correctly.

In addition to the annoying grammatical errors, I felt that his daughter, Charlotte’s behavior was somewhat erratic. Before Mabry left for his trip she was not really speaking to him at all and upon his return, she and her partner Malcolm are doing everything that they can for him. I understand that 9/11 had happened and they were all New York citizens, but even Charlotte did not seem that fazed by the events. For example, when Mabry calls her to try and see if she is safe, her roommate answered the phone and told him that “Yes, Charlotte was safe but at her yoga class” (4).

Overall, I thought it was a book that aimed high but never really quite made it. I think the story would have been much better if all of the North Carolina storyline was cut out. I found those characters to be incomprehensible (especially Audra). I felt like Price just stuck together an assortment of odd characters and tried to make them interact in those odd days after 9/11.

This book was very slow for me. From the beginning, I really did not get into it the way I have enjoyed some of the other books that we’ve read. It feels totally obvious without even reading the book jacket that the author is in his seventies, because I feel like nobody writes this way anymore. I felt myself questioning over and over again- isn’t this story supposed to be taking place in 2001? So far it has just been an old-fashioned, very boring account of a man spending some time with his father in the small southern town he was born in. The dialogue and even the characters’ names feel very awkward. I feel like no one in real life talks in the outdated manner in which they are talking. All the dialogue is very proper and outdated and then there are these weird sexual elements thrown in the mix, like when Mabry visits Gwyn and also when Mabry and his father have their “confession” session during which they disclose their sexual infidelities. (I found this very unrealistic… maybe it’s because my boyfriend’s father is a pastor and I can never imagine him saying the F-word out loud, lol). Also, the fact that his loft was near the Twin Towers and that this is happening after September 11th just feels like a forced side note on the plot… he doesn’t really seem very affected by it. So far, I am not impressed by this book.

I agree with Lauren that this book has an old style of writing. I can't figure it out but nobody writes this way anymore I really don’t even know what to make of it. It wasn’t as bad as the other infamous book we read but it wasn’t good. I can't remember ever reading a book in that style and besides that the whole thing came across as really insensitive to the events of 9/11. Here as just some things that I picked out of my notes that I wanted to bring up on the forum.

I refer to Price's awkward appropriation of 9/11 as a frame for his tale but I didn’t really buy the whole thing. I felt for some reason that it just did not fit in right. To me it seemed very unorganized in an organized way.

The subject of 9/11 came up from time to time but Mabry seems indifferent to the unfolding of the news or the feelings it might bring on as I took it he dismissed it as repetitive.

Of course, it was repetitive, but it didn't stop a society from seeing and hearing it over and over again, and speaking and thinking of nothing else. Which brings us back to a reoccurring theme that we were all numbed by the media footage and mesmerized all over the world as it was replayed over and over again.

Mabry spends the night of September 11 with the Halifax family. I felt like he already was done with the whole thing and had planned his trip to North Carolina, and was more interested in telling a kid about the little painting he is carrying than the fate of his friends and family or the nation in regards to 9/11.

When he finally gets back to New York, we learn more about his fondness for the Algonquin Hotel than anything else about the shell-shocked city where he has lived much of his adult life. Which I though was kind of lame.

Trasker Kincaid, the old priest, is the greatest enigma of the cast. He doesn't really get much of a role and is not an attractive character. But he does answer my complaint of detachment from global events. A certain Apathy.

Later when the priest confesses to Mabry his love for his long-dead son, presumably the "good" priest's son, Trasker says some quote to the likes of the death of one isn’t more important than the WTC tragedy which was kind of weird for me.

My apologies for the lateness of this post. I had every intention of posting by last Wednesday, but it has never taken me so long to read such a short book. I see that I'm not alone in finding the book very slow, repetitive, and mostly unrelated to 9/11 in a strange sort of way. I've tried to find hidden meaning in the text, but it really does seem like 9/11 was mostly coincidental to the storyline.

I suppose in some ways 9/11 is important as a trigger. It causes Mabry to visit his father, which he would not otherwise have done, but it doesn't seem to affect him much in other ways.

Maybe Reynolds Price had an image in mind of things before 9/11 as being very different, and the behavior of people having been strongly affected by this event. Maybe Mabry's detachment from 9/11 is a defense mechanism, like a dissociative disorder (multiple personality disorder, depersonalization disorder, etc.). If this is the case, then it is lost on the audience without more background. The author should have had more of the book dealing with time before the event.

A few things I noticed:

Race plays an important factor. Is this coming from the author or from Mabry? Every single character, even those who are only referred to in passing, who is not white, is labeled as such. A color adjective is added to their name. This is not common in this part of the country - is it simply due to the setting, or does it say something about the character (or the author)?

The paintings seem more important to Mabry than anything else in the book. Another defense mechanism, focusing on something that can't hurt him in order to distract himself from the people who can?

Mabry fluctuates a lot in his definition of "home." At times he says that his father's house is the only place he can ever call home, but at others he acts like his father's house isn't home at all, and NYC is his only home. Is this confusion on his part, or mistakes on the author's part?

A quote that struck me as interesting: "lower New York City in ruins, New Yorkers assuming the rest of the world cared as much as they" (177). From what we've seen so far this semester, it seems like the rest of the world did care an awful lot more than Mabry. Certainly not everyone did, though, and maybe this is what he meant. Perhaps Mabry is one of the exceptions, a type of person who is more concerned with his own affairs than with the bigger picture. This is not uncommon in the real world, but it seems strange given the literature we've read so far this semester, where 9/11 is the sole focus of everyone in some way. If Mabry is the exception, then why is

It seems to me that if there is any deeper meaning to be found in the book, it is the suggestion that when something really big happens, like 9/11, not everyone in the world drops their lives to deal with it. Some people simply aren't like that. Mabry is clearly one of them.