Reynolds Price is a considerable prose writer. "A Palpable God" must be taken as a serious testimony to a virtue rare among contemporary producers of fiction—the compulsion to examine at intervals the rationale of his craft. All we novelists forget too often that our job is not to spin words to the greater glory of the complex, book-drenched, allusion-loving, ambiguity-adoring civilized sensibility, but to tell tales. The telling of a plain tale is, however, as hard for the contemporary writer as plowing with a plank and a nail would be to the contemporary agricultural operative. Sometimes we have to get back to see how the ancients did it, and Mr. Price's mode of self-refreshment has been to examine the Bible. (p. 14)

[The 19th-century Roman poet Giuseppe] Belli, refreshing the dialect of the Roman streets through contact with the Bible, was, in his own way, on a quest...