Noble Norfleet: A Novel [Hardcover]

Reynolds Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2002

Among American novelists, Reynolds Price has few peers as a teller of lives. Beginning with "Kate Vaiden," winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986, and continuing with "Blue Calhoun" and "Roxanna Slade," he has created -- in their own voices -- characters who lay their whole lives before us with all the honesty and eloquence they can muster. Their confessions may at first seem ordinary; but as they speak, they reveal both their uniqueness and their secret kinship with almost any reader. Now in "Noble Norfleet," Price offers his most ambitious life tale yet.

A few days before he turns eighteen in 1968, a tragic event eliminates Noble Norfleet's family. With no close relatives to turn to, he stays with the old black woman who tended his childhood; and he throws himself recklessly into a love affair with his high-school Spanish teacher, a woman whose husband is away in Vietnam. Stunned and baffled by the onset of visions, he seeks guidance from his mother's Christian minister, only to find himself tangled in a thicket of another sort.

When Noble graduates in the turbulent spring of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, he enlists in the army and serves in Vietnam as a combat medic. While there, he undergoes an inexplicable -- perhaps visionary -- experience that seems profoundly related to his recent past and his future. While he never fully comprehends what has occurred, he returns home compelled to continue his service, ultimately as a civilian nurse.

For the next thirty years, his life is externally calm yet perpetually troubled by a compulsion to worship women -- above all, their bodies. Absorbed in a succession of such relations, heacquires few friends or external trappings, though he always remains a dutiful nurse; and he nears middle age in a loneliness he fears. Then an unexpected event forces him to rethink the old mystery that claimed his family. Faced with an ominous choice, he finally begins to accept the large duty he has tried to ignore through his whole adult life.

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1ST edition (May 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743204174
• ISBN-13: 978-0743204170
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,463,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Noble Norfleet, June 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Noble Norfleet: A Novel (Hardcover)

I bought the novel the first day it was available. I had completed it within several days. The story interested me. I do not think that, as a novel, this is one of the most satisfying stories that Reynolds Price has told. However, as someone who has read everything that Mr. Price has written (fiction and non-fiction), I was very happy to have a new piece of work to read and analyze. There are components that follow familiar patterns. Most of the story takes place in North Carolina. There are assorted acknowledgements to family histories and race relations through passing decades. Contents of meals are described. While there are no characters named Raven, "raven" is used to describe hair color throughout. Being aware of Mr. Price's interest, expertise and writings related to religion and religious texts, it is amusing to see characters relaying facts or opinions about religion. Those who found Roxanna Slade an interesting character because of her battles with chronic depression will probably want to read this novel because depression and ways of dealing with depression continue to be explored. In "Roxanna" there are references to education and entertainment via television viewing. In "Noble" sceen viewing is more related to film/video viewing of pornography. Same-sex and cross-sex couplings appear in the novel and readers will find themselves reading more explicit descriptions of sexual encounters than have appeared in some of the previous novels.

Some will find this book depressing---or perhaps too ordinarily human. This was not a problem for me. I am a big Anita Brookner fan and do not have an issue with small stories about ordinary, flawed human beings who live troubled and sometimes lonely lives. While this "read" like a Reynold's Price novel it reminded me of an Anita Brookner tale. It is not very optimistic; parts are sad, but it seems quite real.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You Can Go Home Again, June 29, 2002

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Noble Norfleet: A Novel (Hardcover)

Another famous North Carolina writer was wrong. You can go home again, at least if you are Noble Norfleet, Reynolds Price's latest character. While there is a lot to like about this wondrously complex novel, the African American characters seemed to be too perfect. I understand tha race is often an issue in American novels, particularly those written by Southerners. I also know that many black Southerners and white Southerners have always been friends and care about each other. Noble Nofleet says, however: "No black person had ever lied to me or done me the least unkindness I could think of." Perhaps this is a true statement made by a seventeen year old boy, but Noble says similar things all through this novel. I find that statement difficult to believe. Also, at first I was taken aback by the explicit sex in this novel, certainly explicit if we compare this novel to Price's earllier writing. But would I have made that criticism of, say, John Updike or Norman Mailer. Certainly not. So Mr. Price can describe sex in any fashion he chooses. These are just minor complaints about what is as good a story as Mr. Price ever told. Noble is like many of Price's previous male characters. They are ordinary, quiet people who will never made the newspapers. They pretty much live within the law; but they are decent beyond measure. No one else writes about these types of men with the empathy that Mr. Price does. Noble ultimately does the right thing-- by his mother, by Hesta, by practically everyone he encounters. For all his imperfections, he does become what his name implies, noble. He is in the tradition of many fictional characters, going back as far as Odysseus, who are trying to get back home.

A teller of wonderful tales, Mr. Price has few peers when it comes to writing prose.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You Can Go Home Again, June 29, 2002

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Noble Norfleet: A Novel (Hardcover)

Another famous North Carolina writer was wrong. You can go home again, at least if you are Noble Norleet, Reynolds Price's latest character in this quite wonderful novel. Before I list the things I liked about the book, what disturbed me most is that the African-American characters are perfect. I understand that race is often an issue in American novels, particularly those written by Southerners. I also know that many black Southerners and white Southerners have always been friends and care about each other. Noble Norfleet says, however: "No black person had ever lied to me or done me the least unkindness I could think of." Perhaps this is a true statement from a boy of seventeen, but Noble says similar things all through this novel. These statements are difficult to believe. Also, at first I was taken aback by the explicit sex in this novel, certainly explicit if we compare this novel to Price's earlier writings. But would I have made that criticism of, say, John Updike or Norman Mailer? Certainly not. So Mr. Price can describe sex in any fashion he chooses. These are just minor complaints about what is as good a story as Mr. Price ever told.

Noble is in the tradition of many of Price's male characters. They are ordinary, quiet people who will never make the newspapers. They pretty much live within the law but are decent beyond measure. Noble ultimately does the right thing-- by his mother, by Hesta, by practically everyone he encounters. For all his imperfections he does become what his name implies, noble. He is in the tradition of many fictional characters, going back as far as Odysseus, who are trying to get back home.

Reynolds Price is a wonderful teller of tales. You won't be able to put this book down once you get started. There is not a dull page here. Events take many twists and turns. Even though Noble may be ordinary, many awful things happen to him. But isn't that true of the lives of many people who have lived to be over 50 in the late Twentieth Century?

There are so many things I liked about Noble: for example, his attitude toward organized religion-- I suspect he is speaking for the author here when he describes ministers during the Civil Rights and Vietnam era-- ". . . almost none of them stepped out and said what Jesus would have said about rights for black people or about the filthy war." Then there's Noble's comments about physicians: "Doctors, if you'll notice, mostly call themselves Doctor. They'll walk in a room where a scared patient's waiting; and instead of saying, 'hey, I'm Jonathan Daniel,' they'll almost invariably say 'I'm Doctor Daniel'-- just in case the white coat isn't magic-badge enough." I particularly liked Noble on frozen vegetables: "Why does any live human ever buy frozen vegetables, I ask myuself every time I eat a mouthful: why not eat wet newspaper instead?"

No contemporary writes better prose than Mr. Price. May he live long and write much more.