An Unmetaphoric Illness : THE PROMISE OF REST, <i> By Reynolds Price (Scribner’s: $24; 353 pp.)</i>

The shadow cast by the ghost of William Faulkner over the Southern novel is a lengthy, broad-shouldered, even menacing one. When a Southern novelist thinks for a moment that he might try to grow something in the literary garden concerning the awful weight of family or the exquisite and torturous allure of memory, there’s the ghost of ol’ Bill using his mighty figure to forever block the sun.

If you don’t get the hell out of the way, the Southern novelist is apt to think, all I’ve planted is sure to go to ruin.

It’s been upwards of 30 years now that Reynolds Price has been tending his own literary garden in the good soil of the South. The grand miracle of his accomplishment is that all through those years he has acted as if Faulkner’s great shadow belongs not to a frightening ghost but to a guardian angel--one with more than a few helpful hints on what’s worth planting and what’s not.

In language that, like Faulkner’s, transforms the cadences of the South into a lyrical, ornate instrument, Price’s novels are squarely aimed at finding in the twists and turns of ordinary lives at least a glimmer of the universe’s grand design. Characters don’t so much speak as confess, and the metaphors Price employs to render those confessions are wrestled out of both the earth and the sky--apt images for a region where the sweat and toil of working the land has long mingled with religious ecstasy. Add to this the incendiary issue of race, as both Faulkner and Price have shown, and you’ve got a real explosion on your hands.

In “The Promise of Rest,” though, Price takes on the horror of AIDS, a subject that seems a far departure from the usual bodily tragedies and triumphs of will that run like a swelling stream through the Southern novel. In many ways, however, this subject is no departure at all, for what is AIDS if not one more of this earth’s unspeakable tragedies, reverberating in the same manner as all such tragedies: bringing families together and tearing them apart, demanding of both the victims and witnesses of this horror a clarity of thought and feeling they’d never hoped to achieve?

The novel, which concludes a trilogy begun in “The Surface of Earth” and continued in “The Source of Light,” opens with 62-year-old Hutch Mayfield, a poet and professor at Duke University, leading a discussion of “Lycidas,” Milton’s pastoral elegy for a drowned young friend. We promptly learn that Hutch’s 33-year-old son, Wade, is dying of AIDS in New York. Wade’s lover, Wyatt Bondurant, a black man who commits suicide after learning that he infected Wade with the HIV virus, has apparently convinced Wade that his parents are racists, and Wade now refuses to speak with his father or with his mother, who has recently quit the marriage for reasons Hutch does not fully comprehend.

And so Hutch makes the drive from North Carolina to New York to bring Wade--his body ravaged, his eyesight nearly gone--home to die. The novel becomes a chronicle of the Mayfields’ efforts to heal their familial wounds in the face of this certain death.

Wade’s dependence on his parents and their circle of friends is exquisitely and painfully rendered: “By now he could see no more than a kind of pearly light in which occasional tall or round shapes stirred faintly at a distance like hands in milk. He said ‘Well, I’m here’; and his left hand scratched toward the edge of the mattress, feeling for his exact whereabouts.” Hutch’s inability to witness his son’s suffering and early death as a tragedy that extends beyond his own relation to it feels convincing.

Less convincing to me, however, are the novel’s efforts to cast the unfolding events into the realm of the mythic, to present Wade, dying like Christ at the age of 33, as a blind seer, as the ultimate forgiver and confessor, drawing out from his father the acknowledgment of his own youthful homosexual attachments and longings.

The grand, sweeping lyricism of the prose, which shines so brightly in Price’s earlier novels, seems to overwhelm the events of this one. It’s as if Price was afraid we’d miss all the ways that this singular tragedy can reverberate in the different characters’ lives. But the solemn, piercing music of lives touched and destroyed by AIDS is far too much with us to not feel it clear down to our bones.

Price recently wrote (in the Washington Post) that he believes he is the first “senior writer” in this country to tackle the subject of AIDS in fiction. And he acknowledged the difficulty of the novelist, who thrives on contemplation, in addressing such an issue when we are still so firmly in its awful grip.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that this novel is less successful than so much of Price’s earlier work. But the very sincerity of “The Promise of Rest,” its unflinching gaze, its awful candor, can only leave the reader sad and grateful for such a book.