Finished Mo 1/5/26
This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read. However, this was one of the finest novels that I've read in a long time.
In broad strokes the story is about a 35 year old musical instrument salesman who falls madly in love with a sixteen year old girl. The disruption caused by this action has ramifications that affect his family forever.
The book is Blue (the guys name) explaining his life to his granddaughter.
He has a 13 year old daughter who he worships and his wife his 'long suffering, yet forgiving'. Mom and daughter are both Catholics and the family lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is also Reynolds Price's home. Luna is the sixteen year old girl who is far older than her years. Her mother is a childhood friend of Blue's.
The reveal is that his daughter's husband (the storyline moves ahead thiry) might be having some kind of sexual interaction with Blue's granddaughter, Lyn. Dane, her father commits suicide when Blue witnesses what he thinks is a sexual encounter with the young girl.
The story is told in a very southern, almost 'decorous' style.
From the book's page at KIRKUS:
"Written in the almost buttery style that Price has favored since Kate Vaiden (1986), this melodrama concerns an ex-alcoholic music salesman, Blue Calhoun, living in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the 1950's. Having sorely tried his wife and daughter and old mother by his drinking (he's sober now), Blue at last seems level. But then into the downtown music store where he works comes an old acquaintance from high school and her 16-year-old daughter, Luna. Blue is tempted and again falls; Luna (an incest victim) is a taste of freedom and possible redemption. He tries giving her up once, and is taken back by his family, but the leukemia death of an old bachelor friend re-involves Blue with Luna (in a not terribly credible plot-thickening). This second lapse is more serious, and, in sorrow, his long-suffering wife, daughter, and mother send him away. Blue will get still another chance (the story is boned with second and third chances), but his flaw has affected three—and ultimately four—generations of Calhoun women permanently. Only their patience and grace-in-pain reconstitute him. Price, in his recent books, has been assembling a kind of humane moral iconography: variously posed portraits of the utterly human sinner, no better and no worse than people can be; and strong versions of the Blessed Woman. Here, though, in the soapy re- curlings of the style (``I understood I'd failed completely, now today if never before in my long mess. I knew I was locked in the trough of it too, out here lost on a girl's hot tether, awaiting her will''), the icon seems merely air-filled. The characters speak to each other in conspicuously sad/wise parables; themes are paired too smoothly; and a certain gooey smugness—in the classical self- condemnatory/self-congratulatory mode—lurks everywhere."
