On Agate Hill: A Novel (Paperback)

by Lee Smith (Author) "This book belongs to me Molly Petree age thirteen today May 10 in the year of our Lord 1871, Agate Hill, North Carolina..." (more)
Key Phrases: rolling store, hoop cheese, boiled custard, Uncle Junius, Mary White, Aunt Cecelia (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Following her 2001 Southern Book Critics Circle award–winning novel, The Last Girls, Smith's 10th novel chronicles the post–Civil War life of a precocious Southern orphan using a slapdash patchwork of journal entries, letters, poems, recipes, songs, catechism and court records. Molly Petree, the daughter of a slain Confederate soldier, begins a diary on her 13th birthday in May 1872, near Hillsborough, N.C., at Agate Hill, the plantation of her legal guardian, Uncle Junius Hall. Seeing herself as "a ghost girl wafting through this ghost house," Molly falls under the spiteful devices of Selena, the scheming housekeeper, who marries a terminally ill Junius to inherit the plantation. Under Selena's watch, Molly is neglected, mistreated and raped before Simon Black, who fought alongside Molly's father, rescues her and enrolls her in the Gatewood Academy, where she becomes "an educated, fancy woman." After graduating, Molly marries sweet-talking Jacky, but tragedy dogs her: Jacky dies a particularly miserable death, their baby dies and when Molly returns to Agate Hill, she finds it in ruins. Molly's story is moving, but Smith's structure—the narrative's pieces are the contents of "a box of old stuff" found during Agate Hill's renovation—is needlessly contrived. (Sept. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
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.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book; First Paperback Edition. edition (August 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565125770
• ISBN-13: 978-1565125773
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 7.2 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #34,952 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 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

By	Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Some Kind Of A Life Of Our Own", September 25, 2006

By	H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars historical novel with memorable female character, September 6, 2006

By	John C. Wiegard "Virginia Librarian" (Chester, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: On Agate Hill: A Novel (Hardcover)

Like most of Lee Smith's novels, this is excellent. It reminded me of "Jane Eyre", the classic British novel about an orphan girl who faces tremendous challenges in her life. It may also remind you of "Gone with the Wind", with the post-Civil War setting (except that the Ku Klux Klan in this story have no redeeming qualities at all- which is more accurate), and the amount of suffering experienced by the heroine. The first part of the story, Molly Petree's childhood, is really the best- it is haunting. The rest of it is nearly as good. At one point Molly writes "I gave it my whole heart. I would do it again." That also describes how I feel about this book. Smith clearly did a great job with her research to make this story feel so real.