THE TONGUES OF ANGELS
Reynolds Price
New York: Atheneum, 1990
195 pp., $17.95
As Bridge Boatner of Winston Salem, North Carolina, tells it, this story is mainly an accounting of the summer when Boatner, now fifty four, was twenty-one. The Tongues of Angels, like Kate Vaiden, Reynolds Price's highly regarded novel that won the National Book Critics fiction award in 1986, is a consistent first-person narration.
First-person stories
Any first-person story, at whatever angle and distance from the events depicted, is, in fact, a tale of here and now and essentially amounts to the time of its telling. The primary dramatic action of a first-person story is not to be found in the events themselves but in the telling of the tale. In any first-person story, the telling is the main thing that happens. Past and present are always here and now and are equal for as long as the telling lasts. In such a context there is an almost absolute freedom in time and space, to be exercised or inhibited as the teller (and, behind the teller, the artist) wills. There is freedom to react to events, to comment on events even as they are presented, and, when it pleases, to digress from the mainstream of action. In fact, there can be no such thing as digression in a well-executed first-person story.
Creating a special tension within this form, The Tongues of Angels is, nevertheless, a novel of precisely split time, of a then and a now, of highly significant past events being reviewed by a man mature and experienced enough to be skeptical of his own earned wisdom, and more than a little surprised at his earlier state of innocence. In our time - as distinct from the old-fashioned first-person story where a "discovered" manuscript (The Turn of the Screw) or a spoken voice later recalled (Heart of Darkness) provides a frame work - first-person stories are usually assumed to be told somehow out of thin air, tilting between the extremes of the simply spoken and the purely written. In this slender book, we learn fairly late that the narrative of Bridge Boatner is, in fact, a written one (which we are reading over his shoulder, as it were), being addressed to a specific person, his younger son Rustum Boatner.
And, a little later, we learn that Bridge now intends to share it all with some of his friends. "Maybe these words will also last," he writes, though "not till the sun burns out of fuel, begins to swell and then ends Earthy Life …I mean also to give this to friends. More than most people I've watched through the years, I've had miraculous luck with friends, more friends in fact than I can maintain."
In a sense, this late revelation of the actual frame of the narrative is wonderfully apt, for it appropriately explains and justifies the range of prose styles, which includes elements of high style as well as the adroit recapitulation of the living vernacular. It also makes clear and meaningful the use of occasional self-reflexive elements in a context that is firmly opposed to the familiar tropes of fashionable metafiction - as, for example, when Bridge pauses briefly to explain his difficulty in describing the process of creating a
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