Lee Smith. The Last Girls. (Ballantine Books, 2002) 406 pp.
Anyone who loves Appalachian literature loves Lee Smith. I’d be hard-pressed to cite a favorite. “Fair and Tender Ladies” and “Oral History” are two novels you won’t forget; reading her short-story collections “Me and My Baby View the Eclipse” and “News of the Spirit” is like sorting through a stack of colorful fabric, each one more beautiful than the last.
But for Women of a Certain Age, Smith’s “The Last Girls” is a trip you want to take now: a novel about four women reliving a raft journey down the Mississippi River taken when it was acceptable to call college-aged women girls. The women have come together on a riverboat to memorialize Baby, one of their lost Mary Scott College (read Hollins) classmates. Smith weaves their presents and pasts beautifully, recalling their diverse Southern girlhoods, college days and present lives into a story that will make you wish you’d been on that raft in the mid-’60s, before life got complicated and sad and, well, adult. And it will make you remember your own college days…and maybe plan your own reunion with friends who knew you when.
Based on a raft trip she took in 1966 with 15 Hollins College classmates, “The Last Girls” is Lee Smith at her best, rich with life, friendship and love in their infinite variety and truest forms.
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