A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing.

Few writers are as generous in sharing themselves and their experiences as Reynolds Price. In Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides he told us of his childhood, adolescence, and early manhood. In A Common Room: Essays 1954-1987, he offered opinions, convictions, and feelings over three decades. Now, in A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing, he shares the most recent decade of his life: his "midlife collision with cancer and paralysis," the means by which he survived, and the responsibility he took for A Whole New Life for himself.

His account is a compelling and riveting story although that is not his first aim. Rather, he says, he intends "to give an honest narrative, a true record of the visible and invisible ways in which one fairly normal creature entered a trial not of his own choosing and emerged after four long years on a new life .... The record is offered first to others in physical or psychic trials of their own, to their families and other helpers.... At best," he writes, "I'm a companionable voice that's lasted beyond all rational expectation. My ongoing life may be a fact others can lean on."

The voice in this extraordinary memoir is more than companionable, it is authentic and unsparing in its honesty. It is tough, sometimes touched with humor, always moving, and ultimately uplifting. But Price presents no facile consolation or platitudinous account of how good people should respond to bad things. Rather, he writes, "The skirmish felt like total war."

With little fanfare, he guides his readers through each battle in the war, medical and personal, from his first surgery which revealed one of the deadliest forms of cancer, a tumor of the spinal column too intricately braided in the core of the spinal cord to permit more than the taking of a sample of tissues, to the debilitating effects of radiation therapy, which left him a paraplegic, to three more rounds of surgery in four years. He expresses high praise for the help and support of nurses, physical therapists, family, and friends throughout his four-year battle. "From all my stays I recall no nurse, woman or man, who was less than helpful. My strongest memories though are the calm black women who'd answer my call in predawn hours of a painful stay when I needed help to turn in bed. By something more than accidental grace these women were able to blend their professional code with the oldest natural code of all - mere human connection, the simple looks and words that award a suffering creature his or her dignity."

He praises modem medicine in general. But he is critical of many physicians with technical proficiency and "stunted emotions," comfortable working "on machines not sentient creatures." He insists, "We have the right to suggest ... a warning on the office door... Expert technician. Expect no more. The quality of your life and death are your concern." Price takes responsibility himself for living - "a shipwrecked lone man building a life." As part of the responsibility, he enters a rehabilitation program which seemed at first a "band of cripples ... [who] resembled a swarming Hieronymous Bosch assortment of ludicrous damned souls in high torment." His description of working with them is moving and courageous, "a marooned island of damaged men and women intent on bringing ourselves to a state of repair that would let us visit the mainland again." They learned to lift their bodies, manage their diets, maneuver their wheelchairs, catheterize themselves, and ultimately "to stamp one's way back into life with no favors asked," all of which produced in Price "a heady sense of control and choice."

He was frustrated in efforts to deal with the constant pain his condition brought with it. He was overmedicated so that he could neither function as a person or a writer. But he found help in behavior modification techniques and further relief through hypnosis.

Religious faith sustained him. Indeed, threading through this book is a testament to the power of prayer, which Price called "the first strong prop beneath my own collapse." A religious vision determined his strong intent to live even when he saw "doom in doctors' eyes." At no point during the ordeal did he succumb to self-pity, to ask the old inevitable question "Why me?"...the only answer, of course, is "Why not?"

He saw the person he had been die, and he created a new self - he claims a "better" one. A verse from Deuteronomy guided his choice: "I have set life and death in front of you, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life...." For Price, "Life has meant steady work." His work is of the kind that calls for steady absorption, something he has been accustomed to since childhood. In A Common Room, he writes of choosing an additional motto: "Work makes free." In A Whole New Life he suggests an additional motto: "On my own." The two - work and individual responsibility - have molded his new life.

In his powerful and eloquent last chapter, Price advises other patients: "You're in your present calamity alone....If you want a way out, then dig it yourself....Nobody - least of all no doctor - can rescue you now. Stop asking about the person you used to be and get on with the difficult and critical business of discovering who you'll be to-morrow."

"The kindest thing anyone could have done for me once I'd finished five weeks of radiation would have been to look me square in the eye and say this clearly, |Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now? Who can you be and how can you get there - double-time?"'

Price has forged a new life. "If I were called upon to value honestly my present life beside my past - the years from 1933 till '84 against the years after - I'd have to say despite an enjoyable fifty-year start, these recent years since full catastrophe have gone still better. They've brought more in and sent more out - more love and care, more knowledge and patience; more work in less time." In the years since the tumor was found, "I've completed fourteen books - I'd published twelve in the previous twenty-two years."

He concludes: "I've had a mainly happy life. I can safely push further. I've yet to watch another life that seems to have brought more pleasure to its owner than mine has to me." And one believes him.