A Generous Man by Reynolds Price

First published: 1966

Type of plot: Mythological realism, Bildungsroman

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Warren County, North Carolina

Principal Characters:

• Milo Mustian, the protagonist, a fifteen-year-old boy trying to become a man
• Rosacoke Mustian, Milo’s eleven-year-old sister
• Rato Mustian, Milo’s retarded younger brother
• Phillip, the Mustian family dog
• Lois Provo, a sixteen-year-old girl whom Milo meets at the fair, his first love
• Death, an eighteen-foot python belonging to Lois and her mother
• Sheriff Rooster Pomeroy, the posse leader
• Kate Pomeroy, his wife

The Novel

On the surface, this novel tells the story of Milo Mustian and his search for the snake Death, his retarded brother Rato Mustian, and Phillip, the family’s pet dog—all of whom are lost in the woods. The hunt, however, merely provides a vehicle for a greater search, the one Milo makes for his own manhood.

The novel opens simply, with Milo recovering from a night of debauchery at the Warren County fair. His evening included a sexual encounter with Lois Provo, a girl who works at a snake show at the fair. Milo awakens in the morning to find that the family dog, Phillip, is sick and that he must lead the Mustian family entourage to the veterinarian. He goes with Rato, his sister Rosacoke, and their grandfather, Papa, to meet the town veterinarian, a drunkard. Mistakenly identifying the dog’s problem as rabies, the veterinarian declares the dog mad.

At the veterinarian’s office, Milo meets his partner from the night before, Lois. The reader learns that she and her mother travel around with the carnival exhibiting their giant python, Death. They all meet back at the fair.

Phillip, the “mad” dog, has left the veterinarian’s wearing a muzzle. Rato removes it. At the fair, the dog, who hates snakes, meets Death, and a fight ensues. The dog chases the snake into the nearby woods, with Rato in close pursuit. What might seem only somewhat strange at this point becomes bizarre, as the plot changes from realism into a strange mythological tale. Price also mixes the tragic and the comic, with the ensuing search for the missing trio taking on slapstick tone. The hunt for Death and his pursuers becomes Milo’s road to self-discovery and, in general, a search for truth on the part of all the novel’s characters. Milo takes center stage in this hunt, as revelation after revelation slowly opens the young man’s eyes to the world. In essence, Milo comes to understand the nature of love. His one sexual encounter with Lois left him lusting for more, and this lust consumes his every waking thought.

A crowd of locals—or a posse, as Price calls them—gathers to search for the missing boy, his dog, and the snake. Sheriff Rooster Pomeroy leads the group. The posse’s search—at times somewhat surrealistic—occupies the rest of the novel. What the reader slowly comes to realize is that each character’s life is intertwined with those of the others. At first, Lois’s mother had claimed to be her aunt; however, as each character tells his story, the reader learns that Lois has been fathered by a cousin of Milo. This man deserted the mother, leaving her with the eighteen-foot python. This cousin of Milo, Lois’s father, has apparently died, leaving an unclaimed $10,000 insurance policy.

The men move from adventure to adventure in their search for the missing trio, allowing Milo to see the helpful posse for what it really is: bored men searching for a little excitement. Running across a liquor still in the woods, they stop to sample their find. Milo participates as well, which results in his moving in a drunken stupor out of the woods to the house of the posse leader, Sheriff Pomeroy. There he meets Kate Pomeroy, a popular woman in the neighborhood who looks to other men for the sexual pleasure that her impotent husband, the sheriff, cannot provide. This situation appears heavenly to a fifteen-year-old sex-crazed boy, and they fall into the bed together. During their liaison, Milo hears Mrs. Pomeroy’s tale about her first sexual relationship—her partner was Milo’s cousin, Lois’s father. Claiming that Milo is the mysterious stranger of whom she has been dreaming for thirteen years, the bored housewife reveals to the young man the complexities of an adult sexual relationship. The liaison is interrupted when the doorbell rings and a distraught Milo, clothes in hand, escapes out the window.

From this encounter, Milo goes on to meet a ghost and finally Death. He wrestles with the snake and is rescued in the nick of time by the drunken posse, which arrives to kill the python. The group returns to the Mustian house, where Milo gets some much-needed sleep. Rato and Phillip have not yet appeared, and a bloody shirt belonging to Rato, found in the woods, convinces everyone that the boy is dead.

The next morning, Milo and Lois meet, and he convinces her that the last twenty-four hours have made him understand the nature of sexual maturity. Claiming to realize now that he cannot simply take from her but must give as well, Milo contemplates his future with his love. Their plans, however, are interrupted by a returning Rato. In good health, Rato explains that his bloody shirt resulted from a fight with a fox and that Phillip is well; he only had worms.

The Characters

In A Generous Man, Milo comes of age. This development in many ways is the subject of the novel. As the title implies, Milo learns to become a generous man: “generous” as that term applies to adult relationships and a “man” as the word connotes maturity rather than chronological age. Milo learns to give as well as take in his relationship with Lois, and he learns that manhood has little to do with years.

Although Price compresses time to allow hours to stand for months, so that by the end of the novel Milo has developed several years’ worth of maturity, the independence of maturity from chronological age is not farfetched. At the novel’s beginning, the reader meets a cocky, swaggering Milo, proud at having “conquered” his first female. The protagonist thinks that his sexual initiation has made him a man. What Milo does not know, and what Lois cannot teach him, is that the mature male both gives and takes. Frustrated that her lover seems interested only in taking, Lois continually emphasizes the necessity to “give” in a relationship. At the novel’s beginning, Milo tries to arrange another meeting with Lois. His clumsiness upon their initial encounter brings this reply from the girl: “Wait till tonight—what for, I ask you? Forty-five minutes in dirty pine straw with a teen-age farmer that I’ll never see after sunup tomorrow? If that’s all you’re offering, if that’s all you’re hauling me round town for, you can keep it, boy.”

Using this same rebuke as a stepping stone, Milo sets out on his quest for self-understanding, his rites of passage, in the form of the search for the missing trio. By juxtaposing Milo’s actions to those of the “older, more experienced” men in the posse, Price shows Milo learning and growing. A vivid imagination haunts the protagonist, making him question his constant desire for sex and forcing his conscience to question the moral validity of this desire to use people. This situation becomes clear in the adolescent’s encounter with Kate Pomeroy, as Milo suddenly realizes that the world is a very complex place and lust for sensual pleasure creates more problems than it solves.

When the guilty, drunken Milo staggers into an encounter with a ghost—Lois’s father—he faces the wages of sin. Milo’s dreamworld haunts him with images of his own dead father, a no-good drunkard who deserted the family. Milo sees some of himself in the man, and it frightens him. Finally, he defeats Death, the snake. By punishing himself and by stretching his own questioning conscience, Milo grows, so that by the novel’s end, he is a man. He has learned to give, telling the family preacher, Mr. Favro, “I know I’m a child, but I haven’t stood still. I have learned some things. . . . These past three nights, these two clear days, I been handing out stuff like the whole Red Cross, like loaves and fishes to people on the hills.”

By the end of the novel, then, this mature, learned, giving Milo becomes ready to give to his love, Lois. They make love with each other—the moment Lois has been waiting for. A precocious character, matured by her years on the carnival circuit yet sensitive enough to resist cynicism, Lois understands much of what Milo must learn, yet she, too, must undergo her own rites of passage and face the truth about the past. When Milo tells her at the end of the novel that the woman rearing her as an aunt is her mother, Lois replies: “I have known that all my life, but it slipped my mind till an hour ago.”

Each of Price’s other characters serves an important function in the novel, and each attains a distinct identity. For example, Sheriff Rooster Pomeroy frustrates both himself and his wife with his inadequacies, driving both to lewd behavior; Price, however, treats them both sympathetically, even comically, the palm-reading Lois telling the sheriff that his wife will have a child soon. With Kate Pomeroy, Price illustrates a moral ambiguity by making her numerous love affairs a symptom of her haunting past and her frustrating present, rather than simply making her a small-town slut.

Even Rato, the retarded brother, rises above the stereotype, as Price gives him an acuity not present in other characters. The drunken veterinarian declares Phillip rabid, but Rato knows all along that the dog only has worms. Emerging from the woods at the end of the novel, Rato declares matter-of-factly that Phillip is fine: “Nothing but worms and he’s cured of that, found grass he needed hunting you all’s snake.”

Critical Context

Reynolds Price is often mentioned as a member of a group of outstanding Southern writers starting work in the 1960’s. A Rhodes scholar, the writer published one novel, A Long and Happy Life (1962), and one book of short stories, The Names and Faces of Heroes (1963), before publishing A Generous Man. In this second novel, Price continues the story of the Mustian family begun in A Long and Happy Life. Although he has gone on to publish several more novels and another volume of stories, often to critical acclaim, the Mustian chronicles remain his most popular works.

In some ways, Price has suffered a disadvantage in being called a “major Southern writer.” This billing and the inevitable comparison of Price’s work—especially his use of the Bible and his sense of mythology—to that of William Faulkner have hurt his efforts. Revealing much about himself in numerous interviews, Price denies any Faulknerian influence and says that he dislikes the label “major Southern writer.” His achievement in A Generous Man bears him out: Price is a very good novelist by any standards; he is also a poet, a playwright, and a well-rounded scholar, having published numerous essays on topics ranging from John Milton to the future of Southern fiction. Finally, in A Palpable God (1978), Price has translated thirty stories from the Bible, recasting them in a direct and unpretentious modern idiom; the volume also includes a fascinating essay on “The Origins and Life of Narrative.”

Bibliography

Price, Reynolds. Learning a Trade: A Craftsman’s Notebooks, 1955-1997. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Price’s notebooks offer a rare glimpse of the sometimes tortuous, often glorious creative process in which serious writers engage. Price shares the observations and feelings that led to the writing of A Generous Man and some of his other novels.

Price, Reynolds. “Narrative Hunger and Silent Witness: An Interview with Reynolds Price.” Interview by Susan Ketchin. The Georgia Review 47 (Fall, 1993): 522-542. This interview focuses on Price’s religious beliefs and how his convictions influence his writing. Although he is sometimes regarded as a Christian writer, he tries to convey a nonjudgmental vision of the world and thus believes that this label is inappropriate.

Schiff, James, A., ed. Critical Essays on Reynolds Price. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. This outstanding collection of critical essays from major literary figures and scholars, reviews, and previously unpublished material offers an in-depth view of Price’s work. Includes pieces on A Generous Man.

Schiff, James, A. Understanding Reynolds Price. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Schiff offers an astute analysis of Price’s essays, memoirs, poetry, drama, and biblical interpretations. An excellent source for understanding the whole spectrum of Price’s work, Schiff’s book features essays on individual novels, including A Generous Man.