Customer Reviews

Kate Vaiden

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Although I am a high school English teacher and consider myself pretty well read, I had never heard of Price until one of my wife's friends, a San Francisco lawyer, shared her "secret" with me. I had succeeded in turning her on to James Agee's brilliant, prose poem, -A Death in the Family- (1956)and, in return, she gave me a paperback copy of -Kate Vaiden-. Although this novel (which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle prize) is ostensibly about the entire "life" of the title character, its focus is on her youth, coming-of-age during WWII in rural N. Carolina (Price's home state), and later ramifications. What makes this book so memorable for me is Kate's voice. Price has written her story in first-person, and I found it hard to believe it was written by a man: his insights are so intuitive and so in tune with what I have learned about women's emotional lives (at age 38) that I was astonished. This book is one of the best examples I have ever encountered of narrative control; Price never falters as he slowly reveals Kate's tragic life. (Another example of brilliant first-person narration is James Dickey's _To the White Sea_, his last novel before his death a few months ago.) Kate Vaiden is a character and a book well worth your time, so long as you are not concerned primarily with plotting. Although this book is character-oriented, it is not tedious; in fact, the plot is rather unusual, both in the characters Kate encounters in her journeys (both physical and emotional) and in the events which occur (sometimes to her, and sometimes caused by her). _Kate Vaiden_ would be a particularly good book for a book group, especially a women's group (although, again, I'm a man and I think it's one of the best books I've read in years). Reynolds Price is criminally underappreciated; he has written several excellent novels, non-fiction dealing with Christianity (his current hardback is a retelling of the Gospels), and autobiographical works (including a recent book about his recent experience with a dread disease and his recovery). Please note that _Kate Vaiden_ has no religious component in it whatsoever; it is most assuredly not a Christian novel (whatever that may be). I also highly recommend any of the remarkably good books by Jon Hassler, who writes superbly about small town life in Northern Minnesota (imagine a cross between Anne Tyler's Baltimore stories and Sinclair Lewis, a fellow Minnesotan). The Love Hunter and North of Hope are my favorites, but A Green Journey and its "sequel," Dear James, are also wonderful. Happy reading.

This was a mother's day gift from my daughter, and a first shot at Reynolds Price. I loved it. This author understands small places in the south. As a mother (and this is in the very first paragraphs of the novel), I just couldn't fathom how Kate Vaiden could have abandoned her child when he was just a baby, and "down for a nap." But Kate's life certainly explains it. Understanding why she abandons her child doesn't make it easy to forgive her. It's great that Reynold Price tells the story in the order he does, because you keep asking yourself, "how could she possibly have done such a thing, and how can she ever be redeemed?" The expressiveness in the dialogue is especially great. Kate Vaiden's story will linger for a long time; I feel better for having experienced it. And bravo to a male author who can write from a female protagonist's perspective like this.

Kate Vaiden is a wonderfully real character who is refreshing to hear from. Despite her somewhat tragic life, she remains real, witty, intimate with the reader, and honest with herself. The descriptions of Macon, North Carolina are so simple yet so eloquent and poignant. More important than the poetic imagery and the interesting storyline is the presentation of a woman who has lived and made mistakes (and plenty of them) and makes no excuses for her actions nor does she express regret for her life. She is a strong, honest, and, despite her faults, an admirable character at least in that she is more mature than half the population today; she needs not blame anyone else for her mistakes and she does not wallow either. Reynolds Price should be proud to have written such a character and simply for Kate's voice this is a book to be read, and in my case, enjoyed.

A friend gave me this book, telling me it was one of her favorites -- I'd never heard of it, or of Reynolds Price, but it's definitely one of my favorites now! From beginning to end, I was absolutely in thrall to Kate and her life, her quiet calmness and path through life. I was impelled onwards by the desire to know what came next, what she would do next.

Kate is not entirely believable, even given the conventions of fiction and a little poetic license - she is a little TOO self-directed and unswayed by others, and the characterization of her sexuality is curiously flat -- what was intended perhaps as the reticence of the era comes across as an absence of passion, even for Gaston.

The writing and characterizations, the subtlety and flamboyance (two qualities not often combined) of the prose and dialogue were an immense pleasure to read and to hear in my mind's ear. In the grand tradition of Southern novelists, Reynolds Price captures not just Kate's life but also the ambience of small-town families and a peculiar live-and-let-live attitude that comes with people being simultaneously crammed together and kept apart.

I needed a book to read on a long train ride, and -Kate Vaiden- was given to me. I had no idea who Reynolds Price was, or what kind of book I would be reading. Willing to try something new, I dove into Kate's Depression-Era world and found myself alternately enthralled and confused. Price has a gift for writing a woman's voice, but not a woman's character. Granted, this is the '90s, and women are not only more outspoken and emotional, but people in general are more passionate. I found Kate very hard to believe in her disregard for other people and her deadpan stoicism through her life's many tragedies. Still, this was a book I found hard to put down. Price's language is descriptive, and I love his use of colloquialisms and imagery. If Kate herself had a little more feeling, I would have found the story more believable, but all in all, -Kate Vaiden- was an enjoyable book, and I intend to read more of Reynolds Price.

I am a big fan of southern fiction and enjoyed Price's book quite a bit. I read it in about a week, reading right before I went to bed. It pulls you in and it is hard to put down, particularly because it isn't broken up into chapters so there aren't easy stopping points. I had a little bit of a hard time relating to Kate's decisions in the book, but I suppose that is often the mark of a good character-- she is not transparent and your every-day kind of person. I fully appriciated the ending which explains a lot that you wonder about throughout the book. I didn't mark it five stars because, although I enjoyed it, it certainly doesn't rank up there with *stand out* books that I would read again. I also see quite a bit of similarity in his writing, and always appriciate an author that can vary his or her style a bit more. Overall, however, worth the time.

This was my introduction to Reynolds Price, and I am most glad to make the acquaintance. Kate Vaiden is on the receiving end of uncommonly tragic circumstances in early life, and her reactions and choices springing from these events are one part exhasperating, one part predictable, often dreamlike - we can't be meant to like her. Watching Kate's inner character warp over time as a result of these events is a box seat to a slow train wreck, but the machinations of plot are mainly just an excuse to read Price's wonderful prose. Is the female voice of the main character believable? Is Kate knowing, or a victim of her Southern life and times? There is much to ponder, but the ending, replete with hopeful likelihoods, makes you wish Price had simply continued unfurling the story so as to enjoy more of his dense, beautiful writing about it.

I had Reynolds Price's novel "Kate Vaiden" (1984) in mind for a long time before finally being persuaded to read it by R.M. Peterson's fine review here on Amazon. I proposed the book to my reading group as a possible choice among several other books each of which portrayed an individual American woman. The group chose a different book, but I went ahead and read "Kate Vaiden" (the last name rhymes with "maiden") anyway. The novel is unusual in that Price sets the novel in the first person in the voice of his primary female character. Novels in which the author writes in the voice of a person of the other gender are challenging and rare. Two recent examples of women writing in the voices of men are Siri Hustvedt's "What I Loved" What I Loved: A Novel and Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer-prize winning "Gilead" Gilead: A Novel

Some of my fellow Amazon reviewers have questioned whether Price (1933 -2011)has the understanding and novelistic skill to project himself effectively into the voice of a woman. Kate is her own person and an individual character indeed. As a young woman of 17, she abandons her baby son conceived out of wedlock. Price spends much of the novel trying to prepare the reader for this event. I thought he made Kate's behavior understandable and believable. As the story progressed, I became absorbed with Kate and her travails. I felt for her as she made her decisions, some good and many rash. The novel kept me involved with the heroine and her world.

The novel is set in the rural upper South, in North Carolina and Virginia. Much of the book is set in Macon, North Carolina, where Price was born, with substantial portions set in Raleigh, Norfolk, Greensborough, and elsewhere. Most of the action of the book takes place during the Depression and WW II era, with these large events contrasted against the quiet voices of individual rural lives. The book proceeds through the post-Vietnam era into the 1980s, with glances at civil rights, feminism, the anti-war movement, and other great changes which occurred over a relatively short time span.

The book is narrated by Kate Vaiden as a woman of 57. She tells the story of her life, especially of her tumultuous adolescence, with the hope that it will interest her son Dan, 40. Kate abandoned Dan when she was 17 and, at least up until the time she sets down her story, has had no contact with him. The book is almost a picaresque novel as young Kate picks up and moves many times and leaves a variety of people, relatives, lovers, and friends in her wake. The novel is sad as Kate abandons many people who genuinely want to offer her love, and Price made me sympathize both with Kate and with the others. Many of these individuals are themselves frequent lonely and searching. The novel is also a young woman's coming-of-age story. Abandonment, loss, and loneliness are important themes of the book as many of the characters, including Kate, her mother, the father of her baby, Douglas, her would-be lover Whitfield and others are orphans. Many people close to Kate die in the book: her parents, her first lover, and Douglas.

There is a great emphasis on precocious sexuality in the book. Kate's parents, Dan and Frances, have an apparently passionate but doomed relationship. After their shocking death, Kate, raised by her mother's sister Caroline and her husband Holt, begins a sexual relationship with a slightly older boy named Gaston who dies during Marine boot camp. Kate blames herself. The book includes strong portrayals of this relationship which stays with Kate all her life. After Gaston's death,Kate is molested by her older cousin, Swift. She then begins a relationship with Douglas, an orphan who can be tender and loving but also who has a tendency towards drifting and violence. Kate cannot bring herself to marry Douglas, who also comes to a violent death. During the story Kate has many other sexual relationships with men and friendships with women but she allows them all to fall out of her life. Price emphasizes the importance of marriage and commitment, parts of life which are denied to Kate. Late in the novel, Kate has a conversation with a teacher, Rosalind Limer, who has unhappily remained unmarried through life. Kate explains to Miss Limer her rejection of some of her suitors. Miss Limer observes:

"I won't try to judge what I didn't get to watch. But steadiness is what men seldom have to offer -- not in life anywhow, not in this green world. We're not promised that, in the Bible or any other book known to me." (p.271)

Kate achieves a modicum of financial security. She is an independent, tough, perceptive, yet vulnerable and highly fallible woman. I came to feel greatly for her through her mistakes and misfortunes. The book also offers a portrayal of small town life in the upper South in the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement. Besides Kate, one of the characters that Price portrays effectively is Noony, an African American woman slightly older than Kate who works for Caroline and Holt. Noony offers her own commentary on Kate and on her life. The novel is presented against a backdrop of religious themes, including sin, redemption, and what appears to be God's ever-present love even in harsh circumstances. This is a stunning novel.

Robin Friedman

According to the cover of my edition of KATE VAIDEN, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1986. "The New York Times" obituary for Reynolds Price (he died last January) said the same thing. The website for the National Book Critics Circle, however, lists KATE VAIDEN as a finalist for 1986 and "A Summons to Memphis" by Peter Taylor as the winner. What's the explanation? Second-guessing at the National Book Critics Circle? Sloppiness?

From my perspective, KATE VAIDEN is a strong novel, well worth reading, but I don't quite see it as an award-winner. What most stands out is Kate Vaiden, who is a strong woman. (Midway through it, her worldly wise older cousin remarks, "Few people on earth are as strong as Kate Vaiden.") Kate is the voice of the novel, as it is written in the first person, telling the story of her rocky road from the time her parents were killed when she was eleven (in 1938) to the present (1984), as she battles cancer at age fifty-seven. Kate's voice is a very distinctive voice. But is it an authentic voice? That is one of the lightning-rod questions about the novel. Several female Amazon reviewers proclaim that Price's effort to write the novel from the perspective of a woman and with a woman's voice was a fraud and a failure. Yet many critics (mostly men) praised the novel for its woman's voice and perspective. As for me (a male), I believe that Kate's female PERSPECTIVE is true enough - though one thing she does in the novel (mentioned two paragraphs down) goes against the maternal instincts of most - but I don't quite find her VOICE authentic, albeit for reasons having nothing to do with male versus female. Rather, to me, the novel's voice is a little too contrived and folksy, especially the frequent down-home but off-the-wall similes ("I was wild as a bear in a chickenwire cage at a crossroads junkyard, smelling the woods").

The second striking thing about KATE VAIDEN is that it is a novel about orphans. Kate was suddenly orphaned at age eleven. On a number of occasions after that, she abruptly picks up and leaves homes and relationships. The psychological construct seems to be: I am going to leave them before they can leave me. Kate is much like Moll Flanders, the original eponymous orphaned female first-person narrator. Indeed, the woman who ran the bookmobile proffered the sixteen-year-old Kate a book - "Moll Flanders". Kate took it, but left it unread by her bed when she bolted from the home that had been hers after her parents' deaths. "Not till twenty years later did I find another copy, and by then it was too late to ask Miss Mabel if she'd offered me consolation or a warning."

At age seventeen Kate has a baby, who was fathered by another orphan, Douglas Lee. In the year or so of their tumultuous relationship, Kate and Douglas seem to vie with one another over who can commit the most sudden and dramatic disappearing act on the other. And then Kate does the unthinkable, the act that is so contrary to maternal instincts that many women would naturally want to disavow Kate as an authentic female: she abandons her baby boy. Yet, as a recent lurid episode in Florida reminded us, physical and/or psychological abandonment of a child sadly is not beyond reality. Kate Vaiden has immeasurably more substance than Casey Anthony, and thus the question harries us like an ingrown toenail: How could she?

KATE VAIDEN reads quite easily. It is, foremost, a story, and that story is told with good pace. The novel is set in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, near the Virginia border. Much of it occurs in and around Macon, North Carolina (Price's hometown). The region is wonderfully and lovingly portrayed. "[Macon] was tiny--not two hundred people, more than half of them black. No entertainment but summer revivals at the two white churches, Methodist and Baptist; and once or twice a year, a fishfry or Brunswick stew. Otherwise, you talked to the people you lived with and let them talk. Food and family were the only two legal subjects for the women. Men could talk about cotton, tobacco, Negroes, sex, Roosevelt, and money."

Both Kate Vaidens - novel and protagonist - will inhabit your memory, just as "A Long and Happy Life" (the other Reynolds Price novel I have read) and Rosacoke Mustian (its distinctive female protagonist) have with me. Four-and-a-half stars.

I've been on a roll reading books by southern authors, and while visiting Charleston, SC, I was told that I had to read Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price. Like most southern fiction, Kate Vaiden contains great writing, quirky characters, and high drama. It's also a novel that is moving and disturbing and thought-provoking in equal measure. Price won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Kate Vaiden in 1986.

Kate Vaiden begins with the adult Kate looking back on her turbulent past. After a tragic loss, Kate manages to pull away from almost everyone she cares about. As Kate moves into adulthood, she seems to be lacking the tools to form close, permanent relationships or to make good decisions. This novel was often a tough book to read. There were times when I sympathized with Kate and times that I admired her. But many other times, I lost respect for her. She wasn't always a likeable character. But throughout this novel, whether or not you like Kate, you'll find yourself hoping that she'll receive some redemption.

Reynolds Price writes beautifully of the South in the 1940s and 1950s. This was a time of changing attitudes about race, and Kate is no exception. "I've said what a lot I owe black people, how much kindness I've had--and continue to have--at their strong hands. But of course I was born when and where I was. My inherited sense of how the world ought to look didn't include views of Negroes sharing in person all we white folks had and did..." Upon seeing Marion Anderson in Raleigh, "Her and the thousands of younger voices solemnly asking for their plain due--that I'd been too dumb to know they wanted. So I changed in that, the best I could. Since I'd never been actively cruel in public, I didn't have a visible lot to reform; and there are stubborn spots I couldn't scour out however I tried. But I keep them covered the best I can. And my heart has felt light to that extent."

Reynolds Price died in early 2011 after spending over 50 years as a professor of English at Duke University. Throughout his long life, he was a prolific writer, novelist, poet, essayist, and dramatist. I look with anticipation to the over 40 books and collections he wrote during his lifetime.