A Prayer for Raphael Noren

By MARGARET CARLSON

THE TONGUES OF ANGELS by Reynolds Price; Atheneum; 192 pages; $17.95

Those shopping for a philosophy of life could do no better than to look to the works of Reynolds Price. Since his 1962 debut with A Long and Happy Life, the elegant North Carolina novelist and poet has been examining the eternal puzzle of families as they love and hurt one another, come together and burst apart. The unlucky ones are beset by betrayal and murder and suicide. The lucky ones are brought to the brink of destruction but through grace and common sense find a way to live in the universe and with each other.

Even before pain sharpened his vision -- he was stricken with cancer of the spine in 1984 at the age of 51 -- Price was a master at creating characters others could live through, particularly strong-willed women, such as the heroine in his 1986 novel Kate Vaiden. This time Price focuses on two young men to tell his hypnotic tale of loss and redemption: Bridge Boatner, a famous painter who looks back at the summer of 1954, when he was a counselor at a camp in North Carolina; and Raphael Noren, a prematurely wise, otherworldly 14-year-old who was a camper there that summer. Price begins with Boatner's reflecting, "I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice."

These two innocents -- Boatner at age 21 was almost as unworldly as his young charges--had come to the camp to find a way to cope with the sudden death of a parent. For Boatner, getting through the first year after "the one man involved in my creation ended for good and in my presence" seems like an insurmountable hurdle (one Price himself faced at age 21). For most of the summer, Boatner does not know that Rafe has suffered a similar experience--his mother was murdered while he looked on--and that is what has rendered him so fragile. Yet Boatner somehow knows he alone can save Rafe from tragedy.

But all is not life and death. Price easily captures the pleasures of that peculiar American institution called camp and the problems of "that painful fulcrum between frank childhood and the musky outskirts of puberty." Boatner's boys can "smuggle farts like anarchist bombs into the highest and most sacred scenes of camp life," wet the bed one minute and display extraordinary bravery the next, be ruled by their burgeoning sexuality to the point of visiting the barn animals but soar to great spirituality when one of the last members of the camp's old Indian tribe imparts his wisdom.

Boatner finds himself as an artist that summer, producing a painting that stands the test of time. Happy, with two sons of his own by the book's end, Boatner, whose mission in life is to "copy things that count in the world," can no longer see Rafe's beautiful face clearly enough to paint him. He can only remember what matters, that he did for Rafe what he could not do for his father.

The novel is saved from melodrama by the presence of the camp's founder, the "Chief," who disdains Boatner's poetic, dense voice for simple words, hard and clear. After the death of a boy at camp, he intones, "We thank you for all that's left to the living. Help us see what it is and where to find it." A prayer for all of us.