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Blue Calhoun
From Library Journal
Having survived several drunken years that nearly wrecked his marriage, Bluford Calhoun has finally settled peacefully into early middle age. He's sober now, and he's got a respectable job as a salesman at the Atkinson Music Company in 1950s Raleigh, North Carolina. Then an old classmate from the wrong side of the tracks walks into the store with her luminous, dark-haired daughter in tow, and Blue's life is changed forever. The enduring passion that young Luna Absher ignites in Blue forces him into moral quandary; ever the Southern gentleman, deeply rooted in the precepts of his time and place, he has to work hard to convince himself--and his elegant mother, Miss Ashlyn--that his wife and daughter have the strength to withstand his defection. Ultimately, Blue's defection is different from what one would expect, and though brief, its implications extend all the way to the granddaughter Blue must eventually wrest from her widowed father. Price is in top form here, forcing us to wrestle with Blue even as he wrestles with himself, portraying his anguish in painfully clear, clean prose that captures perfectly the rhythms of the South and of the human heart. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92; an interview with Price appears on p. 123.
-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
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. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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