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Review by Rosalind Smith
Alice Scully is old, but she's not dead. She is alive with ideas, insight, passion and memories -- some of them wrenching memories, not palatable to the members of her nursing-home writing group, "The Happy Memories Club." But Lee Smith's heroines won't be censored. When an elderly Holocaust survivor named Solomon Marx no longer remembers the Holocaust at all, Alice rebukes a young nurse for calling this a "blessing": "'It is not a blessing, you ignorant bitch,' she quips. 'It is the end. Our memories are all we've got.'"
"The Happy Memories Club" is one of six delightful stories in Lee Smith's new collection, "News of the Spirit." Like 12-year-old Ivy Rowe in Smith's tour de force "Fair and Tender Ladies" -- who responds to a simple pen-pal assignment with long candid letters about her family's hardships -- the women in these stories are born taletellers.
In "Live Bottomless," 13-year-old Jenny Dale evokes Ivy's indiscretion. The story, about Jenny's parents' marriage getting lost in suburban boredom and infidelity, culminates in a last-hope family vacation in Key West. There, Jenny and her mother have a chance encounter with actor Tony Curtis in the hotel: "'Are you in Key West on business or pleasure?' Tony Curtis asked.
"'Oh, it's just a vacation,' Mama said.
"'Actually, my parents are trying to patch up their marriage,' I blurted. All of a sudden I was determined to spill the beans, to tell Tony Curtis the whole thing. He had such a good marriage himself that maybe he could fix up Mama and Daddy's, give them some good Hollywood advice . . ."
In "The Bubba Story," Charlene Christian is more inventive with her revelations. Embarrassed by her small-town background, Charlene leaves for college determined to become a new person: "a famous hollow-cheeked author, with mysterious origins." She regales college friends with stories about her equally mysterious brother Bubba, the handsome, troubled Dartmouth student who is a figment of Charlene's imagination.
Like Smith's recent novella "The Christmas Letters," "News of the Spirit" seems like light fare for Smith (compared to "Fair and Tender Ladies" or "Oral History"), but the prose can be deceptively simple. In "The Southern Cross," for instance, humiliation lurks just beneath the surface for Chanel (nee Mayruth) Keen, a socially aspiring young woman on a cruise with her married boss/boyfriend. Chanel's pretensions are comical ("This yacht is not exactly like the Love Boat or the one on Fantasy Island, which is more what I had in mind"), but the story is painful to read as it becomes evident how her shipmates really view her.
Lee Smith proved long ago her empathy with generations of poverty-stricken families in the Appalachians; now we know she's equally incisive with their suburban descendants. Smith never forgets that a great artist makes her craft appear effortless. With "News of the Spirit," she takes that one step further: she appears to be having fun.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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