STARING DOWN LONELINESS

By John Skow

WITH THE PROMISE OF REST (Scribner; 353 pages; $24), a powerful, brooding novel of a father who eases his son's death from aids, Reynolds Price closes a remarkable trilogy that began in 1975 with The Surface of Earth and continued six years later with The Source of Light. As is usually said about concluding volumes of trilogies, the new novel can stand alone, which in this case means not only that it makes good dramatic sense by itself, but also that it is not necessary to know its writing was an act of heroism. For the past few years, as he recounted in A Whole New Life, Price has been almost totally incapacitated by spinal cancer. What little can be detected of this in the novel is transmuted, without self-pity, as a minor theme, the son's helplessness and fretful dreaming in his last weeks.

The guess here is that readers will not let The Promise of Rest stand alone. It is a turbulent, cross-grained story that pulls at the imagination, and that pull leads back to the earlier novels. And to an odd perception: though this is a multigenerational chronicle that follows the main and minor figures of two Southern clans from 1904 to the present, the entire saga is really about only one person, the author. The trilogy is, not far under its surface of entrances and exits, a single long soliloquy--Price's own dark, spiraling meditation, mostly baffled and gloomy, often agonized, on human isolation.

He returns to this wound in chapter after beautifully written chapter, across the decades. Men in his plots are isolated from women; wives die in childbirth or simply pack up and move out; lovers pine or sulk offstage. Blacks and whites are of course isolated from one another, even when bound by love and blood kinship. Sons and fathers cherish obscure bitternes, then meet after years of silence and fail to reconcile. Acts of love are intense but always precarious and often deadly.

Roiling currents of homosexuality dominate this third volume. The theme was present but not expricit in th first novel and explicit but not much developed in the second. It may be that for Price the necessart sterility of gay sex reinforces his pervasive sense of failed connection between people. hutchins Mayfield, a poet and literature professor, and the father who tends gis estranged, AIDS afflicted son, is presented as bisexual, though he is married and his active gay experiences were in his youth. His bisexualtiy has multigenerational echoes. Mayfield's scapegrace father, whose sickness and death are the pivot of the second nomel, fooled around with dozens of women and a few men. Even Mayfield's gay son fathered a child before he understood his sexuality.

Mayfield's best friend, a somewhat overromanticized womanizer named Strawson, confesses that if Mayfield had but said the word 40 years before, "I'd have spent my whole life bearing your weight." Mayfield doubts that living together could have worked, with "the rest of our lives to kill while the world snickered at us at the grocery store: two old sissies, harmless as house dust." Nothing is resolved between the two except yearning.

To observe this steady, fearless staredown of loneliness for three novels is exhausting, though by no means tiresome. What relieves the strain is unfailing grace of language, as when Mayfield and Strawson drive the New Jersey Turnpike "through an outrage of traffic like the silent forced evacuation of Hell." Grace and seriousness are enough. Price's dour trilogy is rich, not bleak, a satisfying accomplishment by a fine artist.