Roxanna Slade.

Reynolds Price Scribner, $25, 301 pp.

Madeline Marget

Reynolds Price's work is best appreciated in its cumulative effect, but the novel Roxanna Slade, his thirtieth book, is as good a place to start as to continue. Here, in the compact story of a long life, are what Price has elsewhere called "the unseen piers on which the world rides," the themes, settings, and beliefs that sustain his writing: Love of family and place, exaltation of sexual passion, and an absolute faith in God. All his writing is founded on, and intertwined with, the events, people, and development of his own life. For readers interested in the transmutation of fact into fiction - as well as those who just want to read an excellent book - Scribner's has recently reissued Clear Pictures, Price's memoir about his family and his early life.

In both Roxanna Slade and Clear Pictures, as in most of Price's work, the setting is rural, small-town North Carolina. It is the landscape that sustains the real as well as the fictional people in his books. The natural world is as critical to Price's work as any person or event. His people belong in the land they inhabit.

"The actual world is worth all your strength," says Roxanna, the novel's narrator. Less than twenty-five pages into the book, Price has told us about her family, "Muddie and Father and Leela of course," her younger brother Fern and her older brother, "long gone, living in Shelby with a dreadful wife and an unloved daughter with a neck as long as any wet week," and the family into which she will marry, including the daunting "Miss Olivia" who will be her mother-in-law. He's introduced race relations: In the early twentieth century, "Mules had Sundays off but very few blacks did." He makes credible a relationship between Roxanna and a young man - Larkin Slade - that, though it lasts only a few hours, includes sexual passion, the intention of fulfilling it on the spot, and the promise of a life-long commitment.

As always, the physical world is interwoven in the story of these human relationships, a world that often, even when domesticated, contains references to life beyond it. A shirt "was precisely the color of the sky, a celestial blue." "Wild as the woods looked on every side, there was a clean walk...through the great dark alleyway of old cedars...to the foot of some sway-backed steps that might have been salvaged from Adam's first hut on the far side of Eden." The Roanoke River, "one of the wonders on anybody's map," makes Roxanna think of the gods, "Greek and Roman...nothing else but their hard chancy power seemed fit to explain the life of that deep surge of water as it poured past the wide bend northeast of Lark's home...." We learn all this well enough so that when, only paragraphs later, Larkin drowns in a swimming race, the event induces heart-pounding sadness.

Larkin's death is far from the end of sorrow and grief in Roxanna's life. Years later, she suffers a long depression so severe that she comes close to killing her young daughter to save her from loneliness. She learns that Palmer, Larkin's older brother and the man she has married - "my gentle silent mysterious husband" - has for years been unfaithful to her, an especially "tangled truth" because the woman is black; racial injustice and the evil of slavery are present to a high degree in this book. And looking back from the present to the 1940s, Roxanna sees her younger self as something near to a slave, because she's a woman.

Despite all this, and more, the tone of the novel is invigorating rather than melancholy. Roxanna is a complex but not confused character. She's knowledgeable and wise, so that most of the time her experience and opinions reflect the larger world. Her voice is vital and humorous.

Roxanna believes that although "very few human beings of any sex or background are called to anything grander than dinner," her life, which she inaccurately describes as uneventful, has had purpose, especially in the sexual bond between her and her husband, "a kind of separate life that we lived in the dark with no other watchers." Roxanna is sure that the people she's loved have loved her back. She's sure of God's presence, and though sometimes she finds him unintelligible, she never finds him intimidating. She criticizes him: "As far as I can see, in fact, God's maleness is His most difficult problem. He seems to have far less patience than the universe He made requires of a loving handler which He claims to be."

Some years ago I read a newspaper article that quoted a scriptwriter known for the verisimilitude of his invented women. When asked how he did it, he said, "I write down what I think, and then put 'she said' after it." Reynolds Price's artistry goes way beyond this perhaps disingenuous remark, but his outlook and opinions, recognizable from his other writing, are clearly present in Roxanna. Nonetheless, Roxanna Slade is herself, a real creation with her own distinctive story.

She joins a long line of characters, actual as well as fictional, who convey Price's most compelling quality: The presence and companionship of a person of generous understanding and warm intelligence. His work is notable in its sincerity and in its offer of friendship, gifts that aren't usually classified as literary, but, in his case at least, ought to be.

Madeline Marget, the author of Life's Blood, is working on a novel.