R.I.P. Reynolds Price, 1933-2011
Remembering Reynolds Price tonight, I recall one of his best novels, ROXANNA SLADE.� I am drawn to it.�
Roxanna Slade goes through a 5 year long depression in the 1950s in rural northeastern North Carolina and the only medical options available to her are electric shock and other treatments she finds deplorable.� So one day when she’s riding with her husband in his pick up truck to town, she opens the door when he rounds a curve at 50 miles an hour and jumps out.� She cracks her skull open on the pavement, breaks countless bones and is taken to her sister Leela’s house to recover.�
The following excerpt from�ROXANNA SLADE�is one of the most enlightening views of recovering from depression I’ve ever heard.� Roxanna is thinking now:
“As I began to swim up to consciousness, whenever Leela and I were alone, she’d make brief references to what she’d read about the ’shock’ and the good results it was having - insulin shock for dementia praecox, electro-shock convulsive for
melancholia.� By the time I could take in more than two spoken sentences and nod in response, Leela was saying “You invented your own shock treatment.� I know it in my bones.� Things are very changed now.”�
And so they were.� �