MEMOIR: 'Midstream: An Unfinished Memoir'

Prolific author and beloved teacher Reynolds Price had a remarkable gift for being at the right place at the right time. Centering on the debut of his first novel in 1962 while he was finishing a Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford, England, "Midstream" is a who's who of midcentury artists, authors and celebrities. After the author passed away in January 2011, his brother, William Price, helped see this manuscript to completion.

Reynolds Price would score well on the six degrees of separation game. In one anecdote, avant-garde painter Francis Bacon's boyfriend steals "Brideshead Revisted" author Evelyn Waugh's gold watch at poet Stephen Spender's house. Or in L.A., Price attends a party with movie bombshell Carol Baker and her husband, director Jack Garfein, at Natalie Wood's house, with author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy, in attendance.

It's comforting to think that Price, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist who lived virtually his entire life in North Carolina, who taught for decades at Duke University where his students included Anne Tyler (Minneapolis native and author of "The Accidental Tourist," she also contributes the Foreword) and who was paralyzed from the waist down after radiation treatment for a spinal tumor in 1984, spent his final days contemplating happy memories.

Continuing where 2009's "Ardent Spirits" left off, "Midstream," the fourth in a set of memoirs, recalls the years on either side of age 30. The first half of the book is driven by the author's quest for "locating the one great desire I'd yet to fulfill (and that somehow still seemed possible): chancing on a man I could love and be loved by, in close proximity from here to the grave." Although romantic relationships occur -- notably with lovelorn ballet dancer Ben, "a pure Isherwood character" -- the narrative always genteelly fades out before the clinch.

Post-30, Price is swept away by the success of his first novel, "A Long and Happy Life," and readers are too, in a flurry of name-dropping. A trip to Rome leads to an invitation to dinner with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, there to film "Cleopatra." Calling Taylor "the small great lady," he clearly values the encounter, despite the stars' deliberate vulgarity. "Lifelong consumer of human beauty that I was then -- and still am -- I was almost never in the company of such gods."

On the day he returns to the United States, he lunches with American composer Samuel Barber before the two attend a ceremony where Eudora Welty presents William Faulkner with an award. At times, "Midstream" name-drops for name-dropping's sake. And the "unfinished" aspect is evident, particularly at the inconclusive ending. Nevertheless, this is the giddy, glowing and poignant page-turner of an American master's life.

James Cihlar is the author of "Undoing," a collection of poetry. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.