The Tongues of Angels: A Novel Review

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The Tongues of Angels: A Novel ReviewTold in retrospect, an older man's epiphany, this is a tale beyond coming-of-age, where a twenty-one-year-old camp art counselor first becomes aware of a healing path which has been opened for him. It takes a lifetime of experience and reflection to fully accept responsibility for his journey, to understand the need to be healed, and to realize how the path, now perhaps less arduous, will continue to challenge and nurture him long after the catalytic events, their time and place, have lost all presence but that seared in his heart.
The story is of the chaste friendship between the art counselor and a charismatic, gifted boy with a traumatic past and a foreboding future. As the reluctant tutor seeks to channel the glint of promise he senses in his unpredictable, willful ward, he is forced to confront his own talent, feelings, and perspective. Unknowingly and subtly, ward becomes tutor, not in overt, controlling ways, but as mirror, spiritual twin, unwitting angel. This interaction constitutes the body of the work, and anchors the subtextual meditations about art, mysticism, generosity, and understanding with which the keen, sensitive mind of the then counselor would thereafter struggle, so as to become true to himself and one with life. These are no mere conceptual musings, but disquieting thoughts that question accepted values, the stirring of moral and aesthetic passions which revolt at what is false, at what contradicts the inner self, and demand action. For an artist it translates as the self-justified need to express in one way and not any other. The battleground is mundane: heart and mind engaged in the daily course of living, at summer camp or elsewhere.
Mr. Price lays all out soberly, with language that is never labored, precious or pretentious. The scope of the work remains intimate, the insights acute and immediately relevant. The counselor's interior struggle becomes our own as the narrative focuses on probing the self as it reaches out for love. Indeed a path begins to emerge as we witness, through the tale, the dynamics of healing: living, thinking about our lives, taking in and letting go, allowing the synergy to propel.
Without Mr. Price's disciplined execution, this work could have been an inflated horror. Which is to say: the basic dramatic situation is recognizably stock. But Mr. Price's art, like truth, is great, and resides in the modifiers. As one reads, the novel keeps surprising by being "better" than somehow one anticipates; it builds to genuine exhilaration. The humor is serious, the tone that of a thoughtful man looking back so as to keep moving safely forward. There is tragedy, perhaps self-fulfilling, but of the sort that anoints. Paradoxically, it feels less than total: part of its finality is to keep on nurturing. "What might have been" is shown to be truly irrelevant. To the extent that there is such a thing as destiny, one is satisfied that each character has fulfilled his own. There has been no sacrifice. Fulfillment is a gift for all. "The Tongues of Angels" continues to haunt, serenely, long after it has been read.
This was the first Reynolds Price novel I ever read. It was a serendipitous find. It occupies a special place in my reading life. Iâ''ve read since several of his other novels and some of his poetry. All of them reward. Mr. Price is indeed a national treasure.The Tongues of Angels: A Novel Overview

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