Echoing Epics

A GENEROUS MAN by Reynolds Price. 275 pages. Afheneum. $4.95.

" 'Milo, son?' Emma Mustian spoke from the foot of the steps for the third time that morning, still not raising her voice, trusting her natural power to wake him. But it had not and did not.

It was Saturday, no school and Milo was dreaming, and because he so rarely dreamed--waking or sleeping--he clung to it now, her his dream, like money smuggled into his head, chest, hips and abandoned there, sudden and perilous."

Milo is a 15-year-old North Carolina farm boy who has only the night before experienced his first baffling encounter with sex. He is also the central figure in this stunningly perceptive, crisply humorous novel. In his first book A Long and Happy Life, Reynolds Price told the amusing tale of Mile's gangly pretty sister, Rosacoke, who resorted to motherhood to win her laggard suitor. This novel takes the Mustian family back a dozen years or so. It is more richly textured, more artfully woven than A Long and Happy Life, subtly fabricating a world of startling and compelling beauty. The book is "a Southern novel" in the sense that the Odyssey is "a Greek poem." Its coiled, compact style and solid substance establish Author Price, 33, as a prose poet of epicritic sensibility.

Python & Enchantress. Price's story tells of a rambling, weekend hunt for a rabid dog that has bolted into the pinewoods, for the dog's dimwitted, devoted master, Milo's brother, who has bolted too, and for an 18-ft., 280-lb. python named Death that has escaped from the county fairgrounds and is the slithering, ravenous reason for their flight. Milo himself would rather pursue his affair, begun two days before, with the 16-year-old daughter of the python's proprietress, but family fealty prevails over private pleasure. With the town's aging sheriff, he rounds up a dozen rustic volunteers and marches off to the chase. Along the way, he gets disastrously drunk on a double swig of corn liquor, staggers off to get sober, and winds up delightedly in bed with the impotent old sheriff's mildly demented young wife.

Eventually, dazedly, he makes his way to the searchers' rendezvous. There, in a disused outhouse the python plops down to crush him--and inadvertently knocks from the eaves a shoe box containing 10,000 long-abandoned dollars. The hunt completed, the python slain, the treasure delivered to its rightful inheritor, Milo discovers that there is more to life than the gift of genital joy.

He discovers, in fact, that he is capable of giving himself. "I'm named for Milo, the old Greek wrestler," he says. "He used to wrestle in the Olympic games and always won." What Milo Mustian wins is maturity, and it is Author Price's achievement to have written not only a rollicking pastoral passion play but a myth that echoes epics. During his dubious hunt, Milo wrestles with most of the classic foes met by man in search of selfhood: deceiving spirits, an enchantress, narcissism, and the soul's ultimate enemy, death itself. If the treasure he discovers is not his to keep, the lesson Milo elects to learn is final: "The worst thing of all is not paying your debts--and paying in time; you got to give people what they need in time, not years too late when they've famished and fell."

Mirrors & Shields. Author Price's earthy, playful dialogue accompanies like counterpoint the searching silences in which people who scarcely know themselves are revealed in a moment's gesture. Readers may find that some of Price's people talk too much. The failing is forgivable. Through their hurt and humorous self-revelations, the author reaches backward in time and downward into desires to disclose the shadows where truth lies camouflaged. His sense of place is unerring. It absorbs the reader into a world as tangy-sweet as pinewoods checkered in sunlight.

Price, who teaches Creative Writing at Duke University, is now at work on a third novel. His aim, he says, is "the making of stories that transmute the lethal disorder of experience into well-formed but honest and useful public objects--mirrors, microscopes, telescopes, but also shields." A Generous Man succeeds impressively.

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