Customer Reviews

On Agate Hill: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

I had mixed feelings reading this book. The opening, as a collection of letters and diaries introduced by a young amateur historian, is clever and the historian is charming, but it delays the reader from getting into the actual story. And the story does take some getting into. I don't like to abandon a book once I've started it, but On Agate Hill took some work.

The first part, the diary of young Molly Petree, was the hardest part of the book for me. I'm a big fan of Southern Gothic, but her meandering childhood on her uncle's decaying plantation was unfocused, with too much time spent in day-to-day descriptions while the cataclysmic events that alter her character and destiny are rushed and unexplained.

The latter half of the book gets better. Molly's school days are described through the eyes of a bizarrely creepy headmistress and feels reminiscent of Jane Eyre and A Little Princess. Her time spent teaching in the mountains is charming, and her discovery of love and romance feels genuine. The tragedies that beset her later life are moving and almost made me cry. But the final "mystery" of Molly's mysterious benefactor is remarkably anticlimactic, and the overall patchiness of the story never really gels. Each individual section, except the beginning, makes an interesting anecdote, but overall On Agate Hill never becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

On Agate Hill is a delicious book, one you can lose yourself in. Lee Smith's indomitable heroine Molly Petree is a Civil War orphan. We follow her adventures through diary entries and letters over a period of 55 years. The reader first encounters 13 year-old Molly at Agate Hill, the run-down plantation where she seeks refuge in a cubbyhole from a strange menagerie of folks who inhabit the mansion after the death of her aunt, its former owner. Simon Black, Molly's mysterious benefactor, sees to her education at an academy for girls, then follows her career as a schoolteacher in the back hills, near the border of Tennessee, and subsequent marriage to a charming backwoods banjo player. Lee Smith has woven a captivating story with her inimitable style and scintillating voice. On Agate Hill will delight anyone who loved Fair and Tender Ladies. It is a mystery to me why this author has not received more acclaim for her body of work.

Lee Smith's new novel, On Agate Hill, is the story of an orphan and what happens to her in the reconstruction era South. That is the short plot, but this book is so much more than that. Smith fascinates us with all kinds of details of everyday life in a period many of us know little about. Though Molly Petree's life unfolds in ways we do not expect, it is really Smith's sense of place and time that are the stars of this book.

The South of the reconstruction was hardscrabble and desperate. The land had been everything to so many and when there were no slaves to work it and no money to pay for working it, where did folks go? The novel takes us through the massive upheaval of an agrarian way of life, shows us how the white farmers dealt with change and what happened to the men who came home and the women who were left to fend for themselves on land they could no longer work.

The characters in the book are where they landed as the story begins. Molly is the orphan of a dashing, war dead father and a mother who had, before the war, never brushed her own hair, having had others to do that for her. Junius Jefferson Hall, her mother's cousin is now Molly's guardian.

Hall's house in Agate Hill, North Carolina, is overrun with 30 people, black and white alike, trying to stay alive as the only livelihoods they have known vanish. Fannie Hall, Molly's mother, has died in childbirth and 13 year-old Molly determines never to have babies. "The things that people really want the most like to kill them, it seems to me, such as war and babies." It is 1871.

Molly's story is pieced together by modern day Tuscany Miller, a former graduate student from Atlanta, who writes to her old professor in hopes of persuading him to allow her to return to finish her thesis. While Tuscany has her own very modern tale to tell, and I must say it is hilarious and Smith might consider using this character again, here she provides the vehicle for the author to introduce Molly's diary so that the story unfolds in first person.

The Civil War cost at least 620,000 American lives. The economy of the South was destroyed and, like the pictures we see of war and disasters around the world today, the refugees hung on, then peeled away to find new lives when nothing of the old way worked. Molly was, she said, a ghost girl, with a ghost family. She belonged to no one and she kept bits of this and that in small box in a cubbyhole at Agate Hill, the sum of her possessions.

Having been somewhat educated on Agate Hill, she steps into a different world when, though good luck, she arrives at The Gatewood Academy for young ladies in Virginia. Boarding schools were not uncommon in towns and villages of the pre-war South. We learn educated young women were taught elocution, history, art and Bibles studies, among other things. The character of Mariah Snow, the Headmistress at Gatewood, demonstrates that human nature is what it has always been. Marriages are made of more or far less than love and depression is not a twentieth century invention. Men will cheat and women will bear their children. In the 19th century, they bore a lot of children.

The decent Agnes Rutherford becomes Molly's mentor and friend. Together they strike out to teach school in the mountains of western North Carolina, an entirely different world for Molly, full of rugged individualists. Once again we get the details of school and social life, but this time it is in the mountains of North Carolina, effectively sheltered from change, protected by geography and preference. Molly is not a static figure even as she settles down. And those babies she was so afraid would kill her, nearly do, with grief.

Smith has a wonderful talent for writing the dialect of Southern people without making it sound condescending. She writes vividly of women, the endless, dangerous childbearing and the manual labor. The women in this book all work so hard. No one sits around drinking hot toddies. The men either died in the war, flee or disassociate, unable to deal with the first throws of reinvention. And the men who survive do the drinking, the fiddling and the philandering.

Southern literature is strewn with eccentrics but it is interesting here that Smith writes about her characters with a modern view of mental illness. We know Mariah is deeply depressed and neurotic. Spencer, Junius' son, is suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. "He walked home from the war Insane." Jacky's Mama "hasn't never been the same since" the Home Guard tortured her and hung her from a tree only to let her down before she died. Juney is probably a fetal alcohol baby as well as being a dwarf. The range of illness is startling, providing the reader with reference points most historical novels do not provide.

On Agate Hill is more than the story of an orphan girl who makes her way in the world. It is the story of places and how a war fought in and around those places shaped a people. It is about the women who carried on and adapted themselves, sometimes over and over. It is about babies and death and education and growing old and letting go. Lee Smith's 9th novel is for those curious about a period of American history that lives in folktale and song but rarely so vividly on paper. If you live in the South, it will be informative, if you have never lived here, it will be a revelation.

In On Agate Hill, Lee Smith provides her trademark mix of humor and tragedy, all bottled up in the spunky personnage of Molly Petree. A Civil War orphan with imagination and spirit to spare, Molly survives the typical trials of a Lee Smith heroine: poverty, religious censure, and love lost too soon. But Smith saves her story from feeling tired by choosing a drastically different setting for this novel; the events unfold in North Carolina, Virginia, and even Brazil in the decades following the Civil War.

Though the story drags in parts - as great of a narrator as young Molly is, we're ready for her adult voice several pages before it emerges - I really enjoyed Smith's new historical perspective. It kept my curiosity alive, and made the story fresh.

Two weeks ago, I attended a Lee Smith reading of this book, and she mentioned that the displacement of the Reconstruction Era really influenced her thinking as she wrote this book. Viewed from that angle, it's an even more intriguing read. Geographic movement has lost some of its gravity in the global age of the internet, the telephone, and (semi)affordable air travel, but characters in this novel are uprooted with dramatic, lasting consequences. When Molly leaves someone's company, they are not just a phone call or email away. They are hardly reachable, as in the case of Mary White. Sidenote: If you have the opportunity to hear Lee Smith, go! She's wonderfully funny and friendly.

The narrative decision that surprised me most was Smith's choice to describe Simon Black's time in Brazil. It was such a departure from her usual plot lines, and it really piqued my interest about the Confederates who retreated to South America after their defeat. I felt like I got something new from Smith out of On Agate Hill, which was a crucial test of this book, for me.

If you like Lee Smith, I think that you will appreciate this book.

Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls, has another great book here. The story of Molly Petree follows her from her childhood living on Agate Hill plantation with her mother and other distant relatives, just after the end of the Civil War--to her old age and death.

Molly's mother dies, then her Aunt Fannie, then her Uncle Junius--until finally she is living with Junius' second wife Selena and her children after Junius dies. All of the people she is close to either die or leave, convincing Molly she is a ghost child. She spends hours in an attic cubbyhole writing in her diary.

Most of the black plantation workers have gone, and her existence gets more and more difficult--until she is saved from a horrible situation by a friend of her father's, Simon Black, who takes her off to the Gatewood School where he has paid for her education.

Despite a tough beginning, Molly soon makes friends among the students and teachers. She goes from Gatewood to a teaching position in a one-room school in the remote rural hills of North Carolina. Eventually she meets the intriguing Henderson Hanes, a factory owner, and is attracted to him and what she sees as a way to see the world. Before they can marry, she goes to a dance and meets the singer and musician Jacky Jarvis--and her fate is sealed. She is his.

This fascinating story is told in letters, diaries, legal proceedings, and such--with some dialect and the rhythm of country speech. Smith has managed to create such a solid character in Molly that I looked at the back of the book to see if she really existed and if the story had been based on an actual diary.

Armchair Interviews says: A novel with a very strong feel of being based on an actual person.

Lee Smith is one of my very favorite authors. She is both a master story teller as well as a master wordsmith. Her tales lead the reader into worlds that are new and different and, at the same time, familiar to our ways of understanding ourselves and our worlds. This is the mark of a master story teller.

That said, On Agate Hill is a marvelous trip into the South during and after reconstruction. After The Last Girls, I was a bit worried that Lee had lost her edge. I found The Last Girls to be lackluster. But this book is among her best. Molly is every bit as well crafted a character as Ivy Rowe was in Fair and Tender Ladies. Her life is thoroughly believable and we can empathize with her through all the plot twists.

If you are a Lee Smith fan, or a fan of southern authors in general, this is a must buy. You'll be glad you did.

This is what 13 year old Molly Petree is doing when we meet her in 1872...living in a house filled with the ghosts of her dead family. Having lost her father and brothers in the Civil War, and her mother a few years later, Molly is left to live with her aunt Fannie and Uncle Junius. Well, after her Aunt Fannie's death during childbirth, her Uncle Junius goes into a deep state of depression, and gets very ill. Not in his normal state of mind anymore, he marries the housekeeper, and drives away his sister who has come to help. Then, upon his death, Molly is left to live with her new step-aunt Sabrina and her children...that is until a mysterious man takes her from Agate Hill, and enrolls her in Gatewood Academy School for Girls.

From there we follow Molly's life... through her four years at Gatewood, teaching at a small mountain-top school, runnin off and gettin married, the heartache of not being able to have children, a horrible fire and mysterious death, learning who the stranger that took her away from Agate Hill all those years ago really is, and why he's never let Molly very far out of his sight, and finally, old age. Molly's story is told through diary entries, court documents, and letters to a dear friend, which I really liked. It gives the story a personal feel.

Overall, I just loved this book, and I absolutely recommend it. This is one of those books that you just hate to put down, and while only a couple parts here and there were slow-going, I looked forward to reading this every chance that I got. This was my first time reading Ms. Smith but it sure won't be my last. Molly's story was so vivid and real that I had to keep telling myself it was a fiction novel.