Noble Norfleet: A Novel

Having given voice in previous novels to the extraordinary Kate Vaiden, Blue Calhoun, and Roxanna Slade, Reynolds Price -- one of America's most respected men of letters -- adds Noble Norfleet to his gallery of compelling portraits.
A few days before Noble Norfleet's eighteenth birthday, his family suffers a violent catastrophe. The sole survivor, Noble throws himself into a reckless affair with his Spanish teacher, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam. When Noble graduates, he enlists as well and, while serving as an army medic, experiences a mysterious vision that seems tied to uncanny events in his recent past. Not until thirty years later -- after a life short on friends and troubled by a compulsion to worship women's bodies -- is Noble challenged to rethink the decades-old mystery of his family tragedy. Faced with an ominous choice, Noble finally comes to accept an enormous duty he's long tried to ignore. Soon, perhaps for the first time, his future seems hopeful. Read more Continue reading Read less AMAZON.COM REVIEW
"And whether my story is a comedy, farce, or tragedy is a decision I'll leave to you if you care enough to make it," writes Reynolds Price near the close of his strange and epic novel Noble Norfleet, the prolific author's 34th published book in 40 years. Price toys with his readers when he writes the above quote, because the story of a Carolina boy whose insane mother murders her two youngest children in their sleep with an ice axe is, at its core, a Southern-fried epic. In this part coming-of-age drama (with many sexual misadventures described from inside the head of a hot-blooded male) and part tragic family saga, Noble emerges as an observer to his own life with few clues as to his survival. Hurtled from the sudden trauma of losing his younger siblings at age 17 to serving time in the tunnels as a medic in Vietnam, Noble seemingly chooses each new installment of his story as it flashes into his head spontaneously. He's no Forrest Gump, but between his bouts of resignation and his yearning for a mother who hardly remembers his name, Noble is a character in constant opposition, as scarred and as malleable as the South itself. --Emily Russin FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
rice (Kate Vaiden; Roxanna Slade; etc.) takes the Southern gothic genre out for one more shaky spin in his latest novel. On the same night that 17-year-old Noble Norfleet loses his virginity to his Spanish teacher, his crazy mother puts an ice pick through the hearts of his two younger siblings and flees town. The time is the late '60s, and the place is semi-rural North Carolina, with all its racial baggage. Noble's father has long deserted the family, leaving Noble with no one to depend on but Hesta James, the Norfleet's loyal old black maid. As Noble puts it, "I was now entirely alone on Earth, except for the friendship Hesta provided and the parts of Nita Acheson's body that I'd been rubbing against me like drugs." His doomed affair with Nita, his married teacher, presages the nature of much of his future love life. After his mother is found and arrested, he turns for solace to a fellatio-obsessed clergyman, Tom Landingham, then joins the army when Tom commits suicide, going to Vietnam as a medic. Back in the States, he becomes a nurse and meets the lovely, well-brought-up Fare Langston, who is nevertheless not a "prim stuck-up aristocrat." But things are not fated to work out with Fare, and Noble eventually discovers that you can go home again, with some mental breakdowns along the way, as the narrative winds back to his mother's release from an asylum for the criminally insane. This accumulation of clich types and situations (the loyal, long-suffering black servant, the Viet vet freakout) , served up in the faux folksy voice Price has contrived for his narrator, makes this one of his lesser efforts.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. FROM LIBRARY JOURNAL
Just before graduation, Noble Norfleet returns home after losing his virginity to his high school Spanish teacher only to discover that his younger brother and sister have been murdered in their beds by their schizophrenic mother. Suddenly alone in the world, Noble turns to the local minister for guidance. The minister initiates Noble into his own peculiar form of worship based on physical intimacy with disastrous results. As if to atone for his failure to protect his family and friends, Noble enlists in the army and spends a year as a medic in Vietnam (it is the late 1960s) , then returns to North Carolina to work as a nurse with burn victims. Oddly enough, this isn't a book about depraved sexual predators, psychotic killers, and devastated lives in the florid Southern Gothic mode; instead, it is a beautifully written philosophical novel with strong Christian underpinnings and an uplifting message. Noble Norfleet is the latest installment in a series of deceptively simple character studies that includes Kate Vaiden (1986) , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Blue Calhoun (1992) ; and Roxanna Slade (1998) . Recommended for most fiction collections.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. REVIEW
USA Today There's a tug between wanting to finish it and not wanting it to end. It's that good.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Noble Norfleet burns with the steady flame of its author's considerable imaginative energy...[an] absorbing novel.

David Finkle San Francisco Chronicle Reynolds Price...insists on celebrating humanity, no matter how quirky. Noble Norfleet is his latest hard-nosed, warm-hearted endorsement.

Independent Weekly Reynolds Price considers the questions of how we go about fulfilling our hunger for direction, for connectedness, for God, and comes up, fittingly, with a new testament of love, faith and forgiveness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke Univer