Library Director’s Notebook
February, 2014
A new novel by Lee Smith is always a much-anticipated event by thosel of us who love her work. Known to some of a “southern writer”, Lee Smith both fulfills the finer expectations of that label and extends far beyond its boundaries. It is hard to find a writer from the South, the North, or any place betwixt or between who has a greater capacity to spin a tale, craft a sentence, provoke a startled laugh, or evoke a searing memory better than Smith.
In her latest novel Guests On Earth, Smith introduces the character of Evalina Toussaint, a young girl whose early childhood in New Orleans in the 1920’s at first seems ideal, at least from a child’s innocent point of view. Unaware of the struggles of her highly overwrought, beautiful mother whose sustenance and comfort depend on the pleasure of her male protectors, Evalina knows only that her mother is an exotic, fascinating creature. When her mother commits suicide and dies in Evalina’s arms, the distraught and now orphaned Evalina is eventually brought to Highland Hospital, an actual hospital that existed and thrived for many years in Asheville, North Carolina, where it was known for its unconventional approach to the treatment of mental disorders, including various forms of shock therapy.
In fact, Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of Scott Fitzgerald was a frequent patient at Highland Hospital. In Smith’s fictionalized account ,Evalina and Zelda meet each other and get to interact many times over the years. Yet Guests on Earth, although narrated by Evalina, is not only Evalina’ s story, nor is it primarily Zelda’s story. Instead, through Evalina’s eyes the reader has a close up view of several of the inmates whose lives were shaped and changed during their time at Highland Hospital, sometimes for the better, and sometimes with less enduring success.
Ominously looming over the story is the fact that Highland Hospital was the scene of a horrific fire in 1948 that took the lives of nine women, locked in one of the wards on the top floor. Evalina as a survivor of that fire leads us along a circuitous but inevitable path towards that day of horrible reckoning. Along the way we come to know and care about Evalina’s friends and loves including Dixie, a vivacious Southern Belle, Ella Jean, a warm-hearted and extraordinarily gifted musician, Jinx, an amoral young woman with a mysterious past, and Pan, a near mute but seductive young man, abused as a child in horrific ways, yet able to connect with Evalina in a way that no one else can.
With Guests on Earth Lee Smith once again creates a work of fiction that resonates and lives on, well past the last page.
