42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Some Kind Of A Life Of Our Own", September 25, 2006
This review is from: On Agate Hill: A Novel (Hardcover)
Lee Smith's latest novel, ON AGATE HILL, covers 50 years or so-- 1872 to 1927-- of the life of one Molly Petree, who is orphaned as a youngster, is taken in by relatives on a run-down plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina, goes away to school for young girls called Gatewood Academy, teaches in a one-room school in the North Carolina mountains and ultimately marries a wild banjo picker. The tale unfolds through diaries and letters that Tuscany Miller in the present has gotten hold of from her former father Wayne, who because of modern medical technology is now Ava, and her husband Michael. They (Michael and Ava) found a box full of diaries, songs, poems, etc., when they purchased Agate Hill to turn into a bed and breakfast.
As always, Ms. Smith writes with delightful humor. Tuscany, who has renamed herself in high school, had decided not to do a thesis on "Beauty Shop Culture in the South: Big Hair and Community." The sexually repressed Mariah Snow endures the marriage bed by reciting in her head portions of Milton's "Paradise Lost." There are beautiful passages as well, for instance, when the young Molly's uncle asks her if she came to help him with the sunrise. Ms. Smith also has perfect pitch when it comes to dialogue and common sayings from the Appalachian Mountains: "Cat got your tongue?" A character is "old as the hills." Another is "tickled." Farmers raise "banty roosters." Children are "younguns." And finally the strange construction that I hear sometimes in these parts, "I taken."
In spite of all the frivolity here, this novel can be as serious and sad as a country burying. The period immediately after the Civil War was hard for everyone, black and white folks alike. Some children lost parents in the war; others died in infancy. Ms. Smith chronicles the times, writing about friendship, love, sorrow, grief, but also living life to the fullest. She has also writen an eloquent essay about the numbing experience of losing a son at 33 and how writing this book saved her life. She says she made her son a character near the end of this long, sprawling novel in Juney, who calls Molly "Mammalee."
This novel can best be summed up in the words of the character BJ who says that we are all looking for some "kind of a life of our own." ON AGATE HILL is certainly as good as anything I have ever read by Lee Smith.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sweeping, involving, intricate story of one woman's post Civil War South, February 5, 2007
This review is from: On Agate Hill: A Novel (Hardcover)
This award-winning author's novel of the post-Civil War south succeeds because - and in spite of - its iconic plot devices and choppy plot construction.
The bundle of old diaries, letters and other documents that tell the story of Molly Petree's life have been collected in the present day by the self-named Tuscany Miller, a funny, sassy example of modern southern womanhood. A beauty pageant veteran whose father has recently undergone a sex-change operation and remarried as Ava, Tuscany wants to return to college and proposes to use the documents to design a new thesis.
We meet Molly, an orphan, in 1872 on her 13th birthday. She has lost not only her parents but her four siblings as well. Two of her brothers and her father were killed in battle and childbirth took care of the rest, including her beloved aunt, mistress of Agate Hill. "I live in a house of ghosts," writes Molly in her new diary. The diary ends the day she is rescued from neglect and rape by a brooding mysterious benefactor and sent to a girls' boarding school.
From this point on, we view Molly mostly through others' eyes, with two exceptions. The first is Molly's letters to an invalid friend, which continue throughout her life, despite the early cessation of replies, and the last is an appendage to her diary after years of tumult, tragedy and striving.
Other views include that of Mariah, the dour, repressed headmistress who hates her (Molly has caught her creepy husband's eye), and Agnes, Mariah's sweet, spinster sister, a teacher at the Academy and a good friend to Molly.
The first section of the book is the strongest. Molly's young, grieving, bewildered voice is nonetheless strong and full of life in the aftermath of devastating war. The plantation lies in ruins from lack of money, and the house servants - ex-slaves - stay on unpaid through lack of means and fear of the unknown. It's a time of lynchings and bitterness.
Uncle Junius, Molly's guardian, is ill and dying and in thrall to his housekeeper, Selena, a lusty, scheming woman who's trying only to keep body and soul together as best she can with her three wild daughters. She gets Junius to marry her so she can keep the plantation when he's gone. She neglects Molly and is roundly despised by snooty visiting relatives and resident ex-slaves alike, but she works her fingers to the bone and keeps the place going until Junius dies and the unpaid servants leave.
It's only then, when her best friend Washington is leaving, that Molly learns the boy's real name, Elijah.
" `Washington my slave name, give to me by your Uncle Junius.'
`But it's a good name, isn't it?' I said. `Don't you like it? It's the president of our country after all.'
`Not my country,' Washington said."
Then Molly too is gone, whisked off to the girls' academy. Her diary ends and the reader's intimacy with her is interrupted. Only scattered letters allow us a glimpse of her thoughts and feelings. Molly is growing up. She blossoms at the Academy, popular with the girls, her teachers and just about everyone except the unhappy headmistress, caught in a loveless marriage and repressing her sexuality with icy baths.
Molly's departure from school is as abrupt and dramatic as her arrival, but, again with the help of her benefactor, she lands on her feet, teaching school in the backwoods of Appalachia, in a tiny holler where there never was a school before. And where she rejects a kind, rich man for a poor, handsome musician.
The plot - a sweeping, Gone with the Wind sort of melodrama - provides a framework for Smith's rich, tumultuous portrait of the post-war South. It's a place of ghosts and grief, of broken lives and hard, impoverished days. There's hard-won pride, but little joy. Malevolence, the residue of defeat, lies simmering under a brittle surface.
Molly comes of age among these changes. Her mother never brushed her own hair; Molly hikes to the creek for water when the well freezes in winter. Washington is her sole confidante and ally on the place but when she discovers his real name she is startled at how little she really knows him or any of the black people she thought were like family. Then there are the lynchings, which no one will talk about.
It's a melodramatic time and the story immerses the reader in the stifling, uncertain atmosphere of it. But the plot's structure provides distance and changing perspective. Molly's diary, while intimate, is a child's truncated view. The shift to third person views allows her to become a part of the greater world as she grows and affords her some privacy while giving the reader intimate portraits of other women and their methods of coping with the restrictions and privations in their lives.
A captivating novel for those who enjoy literate, gothic tales of the Reconstruction South.
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