SOURCE: "The Reynolds Price Who Outgrew the Southern Pastoral," in Saturday Review, New York, Vol. LIII, No. 39, September 26, 1970, pp. 27-9, 46.

Solotaroff is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he reviews the development of Price's themes in Permanent Errors.

In its deeper reaches, Love and Work is a novel about the unconscious and its circuits of love, fear, and punishment—what used to be called God. There is more than a hint of the spiritual in Price, rather like that in E. M. Forster or Rilke, which takes a psychological rather than a theological form: a powerful sense of dark unseen forces and influences that are only partly explained by the description of emotions and that require not just attention but supplication. This preoccupation comes increasingly into the foreground of Permanent Errors, a collection of stories and other pieces that, written over a period of seven...