The Tongues of Angels

“I’m as peaceful a man as you’re likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can’t say it’s haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try...." A summer camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, the deceptively tranquil 1950s, a classic semicomic cast and setting (teachers, swarms of rowdy boys, crafts, Indian lore, campfires), the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher and one superbly gifted boy, haunted by a tragic past yet calmly heroic. All advance through splendid weather, natural grandeur and riotous fun toward a startling fate that none will forget. In his eighth novel, Reynolds Price provides again the kind of voice that won his readers in Kate Vaiden, winner of the 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. A sane adult looks back at his life, finds and gives us the interesting facts, the meanings he thought he learned for good on the threshold of manhood and how they look now, in full maturity. The Tongues of Angels is intimate, enveloping, relentless and rich. Any veteran of summer camp, boys’ or girls’, will hear deep echoes, recalling the buried forecasts of youth. Any reader stands to gain throughout.