Kate Vaiden was published by Atheneum in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It is Price’s most commercially successful novel and his most formally daring: a woman’s entire life narrated in her own voice at fifty-seven, looking back from a moment of reckoning (she is trying to find the son she abandoned at birth) across four decades of running.
Kate Vaiden’s life begins in catastrophe: at eleven, she witnesses her father murder her mother and then kill himself. Raised thereafter by relatives (who are kind but unable to replace what she has lost), Kate develops the defining trait of her personality: the impulse to flee. She flees from her aunt’s farm, from a pregnancy, from the infant son she leaves with his father’s family, from every relationship that threatens to require permanence.
Kate’s voice is Price’s triumph: colloquial, wry, self-aware but not self-pardoning, capable of both humor and heartbreak. She does not ask for forgiveness — she does not believe she deserves it. She narrates her abandonments (of lovers, of her child, of stability itself) with the clarity of someone who knows exactly what she has done and exactly what it cost other people. The novel’s moral complexity lies in Kate’s refusal to sentimentalize herself: she is not a victim (though she suffered), not a monster (though she caused suffering), but a fully human person whose response to early trauma was flight — and who is now, at fifty-seven, attempting the terrifying act of staying.
Price wrote the novel during his recovery from spinal cancer surgery that left him paralyzed from the waist down (documented in his memoir A Whole New Life). The discipline of physical immobility, he later said, taught him to inhabit a character whose defining quality was motion — and to understand why motion, for some people, is not adventure but defense.
Collecting Kate Vaiden
First edition (Atheneum, New York, 1986): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$12
Price’s most decorated novel and his largest commercial success. The National Book Critics Circle Award ensures continuing demand from award-collection completists.