Educating Molly
From the author of "The Last Girls" comes an Appalachian woman struggling to survive after the Civil War.
ON AGATE HILL
A Novel
  Lee Smith (Roger Haile) |
By Lee Smith
Algonquin. 367 pp. $24.95
Set among the ashes of the Civil War, Lee Smith's new novel brings a dead world blazingly to life. Other contemporary novels -- Stephen Wright's The Amalgamation Polka , for instance, and E.L. Doctorow's The March -- have reimagined the period by evoking a you-are-there immediacy, plunking the reader bewilderingly into the middle of battles and field hospitals. But in her 12th novel, Smith goes a different way, using convention and contrivance to tell a deliberately mediated story that feels exotic but familiar at the same time.
The exoticism springs from the distancing way Smith has chosen to tell her story. Instead of a straightforward narrative, she's invented artifacts (diaries, letters, court documents, poems and ballads) that gradually divulge the tale of Molly Petree, a girl orphaned in North Carolina in the late 1860s whose life unfolds through Reconstruction into the early 20th century. Smith has used similar hodgepodge techniques in previous novels, most successfully in Oral History (1983) and Fair and Tender Ladies (1988). Her approach is particularly effective here, acknowledging our preoccupation with the post-Civil War era while emphasizing its remoteness from our own time.
Molly Petree's diary begins on her 13th birthday in 1872 at a ruined North Carolina plantation called Agate Hill, the home of her dying uncle, Junius. "I am like a ghost girl wafting through this ghost house seen by none," she writes; for in addition to relatives, former slaves and a tenant-farming family, the crumbling estate is filled with the spirits of Molly's four siblings, her mother and her father. As supplies dwindle and conditions deteriorate, Molly's daily life requires her to witness one macabre tableau after another, from a dead slave hanging from a tree to the dug-up bones of a Yankee soldier's hand; from the ransacking of the house's few remaining treasures to the machinations of the slatternly widow who's determined to marry Uncle Junius and inherit the estate.
After Molly is molested by a freeloading "traveling man" and more of her loved ones abandon Agate Hill or die, she's rescued rather suddenly by Simon Black, a wealthy, enigmatic friend of her father's, who whisks her away to an elite Virginia boarding school for young ladies.
The novel shifts perspectives as Smith shuffles her collection of artifacts from Molly's diary to the letters and journals of other characters, including the academy's long-suffering headmistress and her spinster sister. When Molly's world expands outside the desolation of Agate Hill, her personality also evolves: At school, the plucky orphan resembles less a troubled Sara Crewe and more a resourceful Jane Eyre or Becky Sharp, relying on her wits to win popularity and academic prestige.
After four years of decorous education, Molly rejects several offers of marriage from wealthy suitors and sets off for another new life, as a schoolteacher in a far-flung Appalachian mountain holler. This is familiar territory for Smith, who has chronicled the alpine beauty and complex folk culture of North Carolina's western pocket in a handful of previous novels. Here Molly marries a twinkly-eyed country musician named Jacky Jarvis and thrives for several decades with the financial assistance of her old patron Simon Black, first as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse and then as a storekeeper.
But plenty of sorrows cloud her happiness: A stone marks each hilltop grave where her seven children are buried, "just a row of rock babies up on the mountain like a little stone wall." Jacky is charming but unfaithful. Eventually, Molly returns to what is left of Agate Hill, where Simon Black is dying, and learns how his shadowy past intersects with her own family history.
The orphan girl, the mysterious benefactor, the wrecked plantation, the school for young ladies, the music-lovin' mountain folk: It would be hard to find more ossified literary archetypes, and harder still for any writer to breathe new life into them. But Smith, who is a subtly intrepid and challenging storyteller, never allows her narrative to slip into kitsch, stereotype or melodrama. On the contrary, she uses these archetypes as touchstones, a bit like iconic movie images, to trigger the reserves of a reader's emotional memory: Here's the same delight that A Little Princess once brought, and there's the unapologetic pleasure of Gone With the Wind . It's not coincidental that Smith refers to Molly, even in her old age, as perennially childlike, for this is a book that seeks to rejuvenate the rapt early reader in us all. ·
Donna Rifkind is a regular contributor to Book World.
