The Last Girls

Although I'm a little older than "the last girls," I lived in the world they came from--a women's college in Virginia--in the mid-1950s. I could identify with all of them in one way or another. Lee Smith has done a marvelous job of "writing about us," the women who came to maturity before the world changed so dramatically with the arrival of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and the war in Vietnam.And for the reviewer who talked about "rights of passage," may I point out that the term is "rites of passage." Women of my age and a little younger went through a lot of those rites during our college years, and for most of us the rite of marriage was the one we sought most. We, like the girls in the book, had no idea what life and marriage would bring us in the years ahead. I've been a Lee Smith fan for years. I pre-ordered this book and when it arrived I saved it "as a treat" for several days. And a treat it was! Once I started reading it I could hardly bear to put it down. Then a woman friend of about my age borrowed it and we spent hours on the phone comparing notes about the passages that affected us most deeply--and there were several. Now I'm listening to Lee Smith read it on CD, and finding nuances I missed in reading it--the story becomes more aand more compelling as I hear it spoken.

After reading Oral History I knew I was on to a great writer. Lee Smith does not short change us with this new novel. Her characters are women we all know and depending on your age, have probably grown up with. Her talent at weaving tragedy with humor is on full display with The Last Girls. This novel makes those of us in middle age re-think the choices we've made and the opportunities we might have missed. However, the way Smith writes it with humor and grace keeps the novel from becoming a downer. I agree that Lee Smith is not only a southern treasure but a national one too. It is to the point where I read not only her books but also books she provides comment on. Some good ones I've found thanks to her reviews on the covers are Moon Women, A Place Called Wiregrass, and Clay's Quilt.

I can't imagine what the angry reader from Chapel Hill was reading. She thought it was The Last Girls, but it obviously was something else. Her response turned into a personal tirade, ending with a jab at Smith's husband Hal Crowther, whose essays and commentary have made the state of North CArolina the richer and more interesting for years. Poor lady. She needs to join the girls on this river trip, have a few drinks, and loosen up. Smith's new novel is not Fair and Tender Ladies or Oral History, which are among the best books in contemporary American fiction, but LAST GIRLS is consistently lively, funny, and heartbreaking. The criticism that nothing is ever resolved is precisly the point. We don't RESOLVE our lives, we live them. These women are complex and quirky. I loved riding down the river with them, and I'd be happy to talk with them about anything. Fingernail polish, men, Dolly Parton, you name it. If Lee SMith is writing about it, it's going to be worth reading.

Lee Smith is amazing. In her deceptively simple style, she offers up remarkably complex characters and stories that stay with you long after you finish reading. Her intuition and humor and generosity are evident on every page. Her fiction has always sprung from a deep place in her...whether it is an account of a mountain evangelist, or in the case of The Last Girls, the story of four college friends who recreate a trip down the Mississippi after thirty-some-odd years. This latest offering is rare because its time frame is contemporary, and it's interesting to see that her strengths are undiminished in writing about women we immediately recognize and identify with. I have always liked Lee Smith's books, and have consistently turned my friends onto her work. I am an addictive reader, and am always struck by her particular voice, which is unlike any other writer's I know of: an unpretentious, intelligent and honest telling of stories, with an easy wit and poignancy. The portraits she draws are almost anthropological in their mining of culture and incident -- I always learn something. The Last Girls is no different. Read this, and everything else you can get your hands on that she's done: Oral History, The Devil's Dream, Fair and Tender Ladies, Saving Grace...they are all varied and worth your time. [...]

Lee Smith's The Last Girls is everything I ever want in a book, but so rarely find. I've given this book to friends and neighbors and my book club will read it next month. It is pure perfection. The "girls' of the book are bravehearted, robust women who take one life-altering journey down the Mississippi River when they are in college--but who later take very different journeys. The book retells the story of their wild ride as they come together and fall apart, say goodbye and meet again. It is smart, funny, sassy, poignant and one helluva good read. The Last Girls is the sort of book that you want to press into your mother's hands to say, "I understand you now." It's the book you want to give your daughters so that they might live more fully and completely. It's a book you want your friends to read so that you can retell your own journey together. More than anything, it is a book that makes you want to LIVE. Utterly compelling, like the great Mississippi herself!