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A Perfect Friend
By Reynolds Price ’55. Atheneum, 2000. |
The
central character of Reynolds Price’s first children’s book
is a shy and misunderstood boy named Ben, the male literary equivalent
of Annie Leibowitz’s famous photos of girls just this side of
puberty—ungainly, vulnerable, incandescent.
Eleven-year old Ben makes for a solemn hero: In the wake
of his mother’s death a year ago, his ability to communicate
with friends and adults has become constrained. His friends are afraid
to ask him too much, wary of stirring his grief or incurring his coldness,
and he keeps to himself, even around the two he likes best: his cousin
Robin and his schoolmate Duncan. When Duncan tells him that a circus
is coming to town, Ben becomes—and stays—so absorbed in
fantasies about elephants and his private plans that he cuts Duncan
off for weeks.
Ben’s mother had taught him to draw elephants, and
now he has become obsessed with their beauty and strength. Strength
has a magical, life-saving quality: Early on he reminds himself that
“Dad and I are both a whole lot stronger than we were right after
Mother died,” though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
“Most days,” we are told, “he felt like a boy who would
never be stronger or have his own safe family.” His father, embittered
and maudlin, drinks himself into a stupor at night and reminds Ben
both that his own future is bleak, and that Ben is responsible for
salvaging his surviving parent: “When I was your age,” he
tells Ben, “I was cruel as you are; and look at me now. I’m
a lonesome man whose wife has died, and all the company I’ve
got in my life is a coldhearted son who’ll leave my house in
another few years, and I’ll sit here till I drop dead.”
Enter the elephant, Sala (Sal for short), whom Ben manages
to meet face to face and fall in love with at once. But he has to
remind her at a critical moment, “I’m a young boy, Sal,
a lot weaker than you.” He fantasizes about how strength can
lead to violence: “Ben even realized that, with their famous
strength, any one of [the elephants] could take a single step, break
free completely, and kill every person in the whole crowded tent.”
He wants to be an elephant, not so he can go on a killing rampage,
but precisely because their enigmatic strength is so controlled. They
seem to him always to be dancing alone.
Other adults around Ben are either lost in their own neuroses
and preoccupations or seem perfectly positioned to further his own.
Everybody is sad, wounded in some secret place. Saddest of all is
that Ben’s preoccupation with his own sadness makes it hard for
him to see it in others and connect with them. Even when Duncan spills
his guts about his family’s poverty, the beatings he receives
from his own father, and his admiration for him, Ben feels jealous
that his friend seems to know more than he does about “pain and
shame and how to last through them and come out laughing.”
Ben is what my grandmother used to call an old soul. A
grim young philosopher, he’s headed for solipsism and abulia,
not enlightenment. When he looks into Sal’s eyes, she seems “thoroughly
lonesome and nearly hopeless but…also ready to laugh if anybody
or anything would give it a chance.” And when she salutes him
in the circus ring, picking him out from among hundreds of strangers
for her special regard, he thinks, “Good things were stacking
up too fast here; something awful might come next.”
Ben comes by his despair honestly, of course; he learned
during his mother’s illness the tough lesson that intercessory
prayer is ineffectual at generating anything more than hope. But this
novel is precisely about hope in the face of unbearable suffering,
and one cannot but regard it through the lens of Price’s 1994
A Whole New Life, in which he chronicled his spiritual and physical
struggle with cancer. As in that autobiographical account for grown-ups,
there is something here like a movement of grace, though not identified
as such.
If this is a religious novel for young readers, it is
one that does not attempt the fancy, fantasy, and allegorical filigree
of C.S. Lewis. It is sturdy, craftsmanly work, not without its own
subtle beauties. In the course of the narrative, Ben gradually permits
Robin and Duncan to come closer to his inner life, inviting each on
different nights to attend the circus with him. They, perhaps part
of the same asymptotic grace that brings him to Sala, humanize him.
His relationship with Robin finally takes a breathtaking turn in which
we glimpse the promise of a less lonely future. After Duncan, at first
a bit silly as seen through Ben’s eyes, reveals himself and Ben
invites him to the circus, he discovers that his friend is far more
perceptive and more sensitive than he imagined. It is Duncan who finally
says the word that saves Ben’s life, and one senses that their
relationship will have deepened by several notches in the story’s
aftermath, though we do not stick around to see it.
This gentle tale is also about coming of age and, inevitably,
the transformative role of friendship. We never quite believe with
Ben that he communicates telepathically with animals; too much of
his conversation with the old family dog and the circus elephant seems
an obvious projection of his deepest wishes and fears. Part of Price’s
magic is that it doesn’t matter: Ben believes, and that’s
good enough for us. What the animals say generally reassures him,
but when he betrays Sala by refusing her request that he stay with
her forever—just as he “betrayed” his mother by not
preventing her death—he gets a different message, one that may
reflect the inherent danger in his believing the anthropomorphic voices
he hears but which, in any case, brings him close enough to real danger
that he catches a whiff of death and, through that trauma, finally
reconciles with the memory of his mother.
The author unmistakably intrudes from time to time, but
it is hard to regret Price’s dulcet insights. Part of the book’s
strength is the pleasure one gleans from its occasionally striking
images: seeing the clowns and acrobats in a state of deshabille, Ben
thinks “they seemed like people whose bodies were nothing but
toys that they were mistreating intentionally.” If the tone and
diction occasionally deviate from what most eleven-year -old readers
would tolerate, such diversions are never sustained long, and the
audience’s attention is apt to be recaptured in short order by
the book’s innocent humor and inexorable though undemanding pace.
If you have a sober preadolescent in your family, this book may be
for him.
—Paul Baerman
Baerman M.B.A. ’90 is special assistant to the president at
Duke. |
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The
central character of Reynolds Price’s first children’s book
is a shy and misunderstood boy named Ben, the male literary equivalent
of Annie Leibowitz’s famous photos of girls just this side of
puberty—ungainly, vulnerable, incandescent.