SOURCE: "Permanent Errors" in Reynolds Price, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 87-110.

Rooke is an American critic and short story writer. In the following excerpt, she examines the series of errors that lead to isolation and imperfect love in Permanent Errors.

Permanent Errors is, according to Price, an "attempt to isolate in a number of lives the central error of act, will, understanding which, once made, has been permanent, incurable, but whose diagnosis and palliation are the hopes of continuance." Loosely defined, it is a collection of stories divided into four parts. The first part, however, is really four stories which combine to form a discontinuous novella; the second is described by Price as "narrative poems of personal loss, therefore elegies"; the third contains one conventional story and six interrelated, surrealistic fragments; and the fourth is a novella. The "central error" throughout is a failure in love, whose "diagnosis and...