Coming of age is hard enough for girls today, so it must have been especially so during Reconstruction. The Surrender, as it was referred to in some parts, ruined the South’s economy, causing chaos within families. Plantations were broken up and fell into ruin. Long-time slaves migrated north. The war wasn’t just a defeat. It ripped the scaffolding from antebellum society, and in doing so exposed some of its prevailing attitudes towards women: the obsession with virtue, the fear about the miscegenation of races, the anxiety over class.
Lee Smith’s new novel, “On Agate Hill,” introduces Molly Petree, a child who comes into the world at this precise moment of chaos and faces all the likely choices a formerly landed woman of that time must have struggled through. Does she linger behind and cultivate the ghosts of her past? Or should she forge ahead into likely penury on the chance that it might bring her greater freedom? Although some women must have craved the livery service they once enjoyed, some of them must have wanted a room of their own.
Molly is such a woman. Not surprisingly, her story comes to us from an enterprising Ph.D. student, who presents Molly’s diary and a box of curios to a documentary studies professor in the fall of 2006. Smith’s narrative emerges as a montage then, proceeding from Molly’s diary to her letters to testimony from a headmaster and (when Molly becomes a school instructor herself) a fellow teacher, to more testimony from Molly’s brother-in-law, and then a tidy wrap-up from our graduate student.
This structure immediately places “On Agate Hill” under a few limitations that it never quite overcomes. Each section unfolds in a first-person voice, but Smith doesn’t entirely inhabit all of them successfully. Molly’s voice feels contrived and far away – the idea of a girl’s way of writing from that time, but sometimes too punched up to be believed. “When I think of you,” she writes to her best friend at high-school age, “I feel like a flame is running through my body like a fire across a field and I wonder if this is what it is like to be purified by suffering.”
Molly’s interest in suffering is hardly an idle one. She takes a beating in this book, and one keeps reading almost out of pity for her. Molly’s father was killed in the war, leaving her under the legal guardianship of her Uncle Junius, who is in turn seduced by his housekeeper, a former whore. Molly escapes this crumbling tableau when an old friend of her father’s whisks her off to prep school. She is happy there for a time, until she becomes the object of the headmaster’s sexual attention, and again she must flee.
This rhythm – adaptation, loss, and then flight – gives “On Agate Hill” a picaresque momentum that harks back to the novels of its time. Molly is like a grown-up, Southern version of Louisa May Alcott’s Jo, only she is thrown into circumstances that test her essentially wholesome nature. For the most part, she battles back not with sass – which modern novels seem to think is universally charming – but pluck. As this is Smith’s first historical novel, she deserves credit for understanding this subtle, but essential period point.
Ultimately, though, there is something too theatrical about Molly’s journey to make it winning. Hers is a sad story, but it comes to us in shards, a structure that seems at odds with the hyperrealism of Smith’s delivery. By making us reach into this box of curios, and adapt to so many different voices, Smith does not help us identify with Molly’s plight, but pushes her farther and farther away from us.
Molly becomes not a living, breathing woman, but a curio, a ghost, something she anticipates. “I am like a ghost girl,” she says at the novel’s beginning, “wafting through this ghost house seen by none.” Sadly, for all its energy and accuracy, this book doesn’t help.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
On Agate Hill
By Lee Smith
Algonquin, 367 pages, $24.95
