Smith summons up a poignant voice of the Old South

On Agate Hill
By Lee Smith
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 367 pp., $24.95

The Southern writer Lee Smith is an archivist at heart -- the voice of her characters seems to speak to her most clearly through their own written words. In her most acclaimed novel, "Fair and Tender Ladies ," the life history of Ivy Rowe is told entirely through letters written over several decades, and other novels rely on "transcribed" diaries and correspondence, including "Oral History" and "The Christmas Letters."

Now in her newest novel, "On Agate Hill," Smith is once again drawn to a dusty box of "old stuff." The comic set up is classic Smith -- a college drop out named Tuscany Miller discovers the box hidden under the eaves of Agate Hill, a dilapidated mansion that her transgendered father "Ava" is renovating into a bed-and-breakfast. The hodge podge of letters, diaries, poems, and old court papers tells the saga of an indomitable young woman named Molly Petree and her picaresque journey through the reconstructed South.

The novel begins in 1872 , when the orphaned Molly makes the first entry in a diary: "I know I am a spitfire and a burden. I do not care." She is holed up in an attic hideaway, observing the chaotic life at Agate Hill through a chink in the wall. "I live in a house of ghosts," she writes. "I am nowhere, a ghost girl." Her father and three brothers have died in the war, and she has washed up at the "ransacked" mansion of her uncle Junius, who is still reeling from the loss of his own wife and sons.

She watches as the tenant farmer's scheming widow, Selena, inveigles her way into Uncle Junius's bed and soon becomes the new mistress of Agate Hill. Molly is rescued from this "sad place of sorrow and death" by Simon Black, a childhood friend of Molly's father's, who makes a substantial donation to Gatewood Academy, a fancy boarding school, so it will accept a girl with such an unsavory pedigree.

Molly's school days are narrated by the diaries of her teacher Agnes Rutherford and Gatewood's deranged headmistress, Mariah Snow, the most colorful character in the novel. Snow's diary starts off with the grim vow to have a "greater Resignation to my lot," but it soon lapses into tirades against the lustful Dr. Snow, who insists on his "Conjugal Rights," with the usual results. Every nine months or so, her diary dutifully reports "Gave birth." When Dr. Snow is caught making advances to Molly, his wife unravels completely and Molly, with her defender Agnes in tow, is again cast out.

In the next step on her journey, Molly becomes the teacher in a one-room school on Bobcat Mountain in the "Lost Province" in western North Carolina. All the ladylike behavior she learned at Gatewood is useless in Appalachia. Molly soon discovers she prefers being a "bad girl" with a taste for straight whiskey, wild dancing, and a banjo player with long blond locks named Jacky Jarvis. They marry, but their love is worn away by a series of stillborn children until all that remains is "a row of rock babies up on the mountain like a little stone wall."

With no place else to go, Molly returns to Agate Hill, now overgrown and fallen in, and settles in a curious ménage with Simon , her mysterious benefactor, and Juney, Selena's damaged child, stunted and doughy "like a gingerbread man." By the time Molly writes the final diary entry, in 1927 , 50 years after the first, she is as much of a relic of the Old South as Agate Hill itself.

Many of the characters and settings in "On Agate Hill" are the most crusty archetypes of the Southern novel -- the feisty orphan, the sadistic teacher-stepmother, the demon lover, the ruined plantation. But Smith includes the kind of quirky historic details that make Molly's story feel fresh and original. Former belles are reduced to sewing "Baltimore work" to sell up north; Molly's family graveyard ends up on the seventh fairway of a golf course.

Like the hidden trove of love letters in A. S. Byatt's "Possession," the cache of documents that spells out Molly's journey from start to finish without a gap has a highly improbable feel. It seems unlikely that Molly, Mariah , and Simon would have had much spare time in their hardscrabble lives to keep diaries and write confessional letters, or that they would have been preserved in a handy pile, undamaged and unread, for over a century. It seems even more unlikely that they would have been unearthed by a slacker student who is trying to get back into the good graces of her history professor. But as John Gardner wrote, the successful tale writer "charms [his reader] into dropping objections." "On Agate Hill," as lyrical and haunting as an Appalachian ballad, casts a powerful charm.

Caroline Preston lives in Charlottesville, Va. Her latest novel is "Gatsby's Girl."