Oral History
Lee Smith, 1983
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345410283
Summary
When Jennifer, a college student, returns to her childhood home of Hoot Owl Holler with a tape recorder, the tales of murder and suicide, incest and blood ties, bring to life a vibrant story of a doomed family that still refuses to give up.
Oral History merges reality, superstition, and legend in this Appalachian odyssey about a strange family whose tragedies and star-crossed love affairs lead them to believe they're cursed. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—November 1, 1944
• Where—Grundy, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Hollins College
• Currently—lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her home roots in the Southeastern United States in her works of literature. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry award and the Academy Award For Literature. Her recent book The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list.
Lee Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Virginia, was a college graduate who had come to Grundy to teach school.
Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing—and selling, for a nickel apiece—stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers."
After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. It was in 1966, during her senior year at Hollins, that Smith's literary career began to take off. She submitted an early draft of a coming-of-age novel to a Book-of-the-Month Club contest and was awarded one of twelve fellowships. Two years later, that novel, The Last Day the Dog Bushes Bloomed (Harper & Row, 1968), became Smith's first published work of fiction.
Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as two collections of short stories, and has received eight major writing awards.
Following her graduation from Hollins, Smith married a poet and teacher, whom she accompanied from university to university as his teaching assignments changed. She kept busy writing reviews for local papers and raising two little boys, but found little time for her own fiction. By 1971, though, she'd completed her second novel, Something in the Wind, which garnered generally favorable reviews. But her next novel, Fancy Strut (1973), was widely praised by critics as a comic masterpiece.
In 1974 Smith and her family moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she finished Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), a much darker work than her readers had come to expect. Next she turned her attention to short stories, for which she won O. Henry Awards in 1978 and 1980. Smith published her first collection of short stories Cakewalk in 1981. It was also about this time that her marriage broke up, and she accepted a teaching job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she teaches today. In 1983 her fifth novel, Oral History, became a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, exposing Smith for the first time to a wide national audience. In 1985 she published Family Linen and married journalist Hal Crowther, to whom she dedicated the new book.
Since then, Smith has published Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) and Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (1990), her second book of short stories. In 1992 she published The Devil's Dream, a generational saga about a family of country musicians; in 1995 her ninth novel, Saving Grace, and in 1996 the novella The Christmas Letters, her eleventh work of fiction. News of the Spirit, a collection of stories and novellas was published in 1997. She published New York Times Bestseller The Last Girls in 2002.
On Agate Hill, published in 2006, is in the style of the nineteenth century epistolary novel and set in the South during the Reconstruction. The novel contains some characters based upon historical people from the Burwell School, an early female boarding school, now an historic site located near Lee's home.
Lee Smith currently lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina and Jefferson, NC. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
What Lee Smith does best of all in this multigeneration family history is to capture the voices that tell her story...her mimicry is perfect. And voices aren't all that Lee Smith does well. The lore of the Virginia mountain terrain seems second nature to her.... It's also part of Lee Smith's talent to make such folk tales [as the Cantrells'] remain plausible as they get passed from generation to generation.... Unfortunately, Oral History is more successful at exploring the origin of the Cantrell curse than it is at translating its effects into the present.... It may be that Miss Smith is leaning over backward to avoid the melodrama that marred her last novel, Black Mountain Breakdown.... If that's the case, then she's gone too far.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
Recreates a vanished way of life with stunning authenticity.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A novel as dark, winding, complicated as the hill country itself.... You could make comparisons to Faulkner and Carson McCullers, to The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Wuthering Heights. You could employ all those familiar ringing terms of praise: "rare," "brilliant," "unforgettable." But Lee Smith and Oral History make you wish that all those phrases were fresh and new, that all those comparisons had never before been made. This is a novel deserving of unique praise.
Village Voice
Enchanting.... [I]nterwoven with the moving and deeply human recital of loves and losses are the folklore, the music, the scenery of the region—one can almost hear the twang of the banjos and the high nasal voices; one almost breathes in the air of Hoot Owl Holler.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
A fine novel.... Wonderfully energetic.... A corner of American that I'm coming to think of as Lee Smith country.
Harper's
Discussion Questions
1. Oral History begins as a third person narrative, told from the viewpoint of a modern college co-ed, Jennifer. Why does Lee Smith frame the novel in this manner? How is it an effective narrative technique?
2. How does the novel function as an actual oral history? What are the effects of a shifting narrative voice and perspective? Through form, content and style, how does Smith make each voice distinctive?
3. The major stories of Oral History center on Almarine, Dory and Pearl. Why are their stories told from the vantage points of others? Does this make their tales more or less effective? Why?
4. In which ways do superstition and natural magic form a foundation of belief in Oral History? What are some examples of events in the novel where spells are used to explain both good events and evil occurrences? Is weather ever personified as a force of good or of evil? How?
5. In the beginning of the novel, how does Smith depict young Almarine? What is his family life like? Why does he value Hoot Owl Holler so much? How does his life change after he becomes determined to find a girl, at Granny Younger's request?
6. How does Granny Younger provide guidance to those around her? What about her character inspires respect? In which ways does she serve as the matriarch of the community around her? After Granny's death, how does Rhoda Hibbitts take her place as the bedrock of the community?
7. What about Emmy so mesmerizes Almarine? What attracts Emmy to him? How does she adjust her life at first to be a suitable wife to him? What about her causes others fear and consternation? Why, ultimately, does Almarine force her to leave, and why does that cause him such pain?
8. How does Almarine meet his second wife, Pricey Jane? How is she different from Emmy? In which ways is she a "girl like a summer day," as Granny Younger says (page 63)? What is her relationship with Almarine like? How is the story of their marriage, and its untimely end, reminiscent of folklore or a fairy tale?
9. Almarine's son, Eli, and Pricey Jane die unexpectedly. What practical reasons can explain their deaths? Why do others blame Red Emmy for it? How does Almarine change after Eli and Pricey Jane's death? What prompts Almarine to then form a relationship with Vashti?
10. How does Almarine change as he grows older? Which of his positive traits harden into negative ones? What actions lead to his death, and how does his family react to it? Does his murder prompt the unraveling of his family? How?
11. Who are the women in Oral History who most captivate those around them? Do these women share any characteristics in common? In your opinion, who comes the closest to finding true love? Who is the most miserable? Why?
12. How does the character of Richard Burlage compare and contrast to the individuals you meet in the first section of Oral History? How is his journal different in terms of content, style and awareness?
13. What motivations—both selfish and unselfish—propel Richard to travel from his privileged home to teach school in Appalachia? How does his family, particularly his brother, react to that decision? How does his life of privilege inform his perceptions of those he meets? What are his attitudes toward his new students and their families?
14. Why does Richard take special note of Jink Cantrell? How does Jink react to Richard's special attention, and why does Richard give it to him? How does Richard's attitude toward Jink change after Dory enters the picture? What does Jink think about Richard after he's gone? Why does Jink save the orange that Richard has given him? What does it represent to Jink?
15. In which ways does Dory intrigue Richard? What does the schoolteacher represent to her? How is the relationship realistic, and in which ways is it rooted in fantasy? Do you think that Dory ever intends to leave her home? Why or why not?
16. Ora Mae not only conceals from Dory the love letter that Richard has written, but also tells him Dory never wants to see him again. Why does she do this? What effect does this deceit have on Dory and Richard individually, and on their relationship? What does that action say about Ora Mae's concept of choice, particularly as it pertains to her half-sister?
17. How does Dory change after she is "ruint," marries Little Luther and becomes a mother? Why does she leave and wander about without giving any warning? What is the reaction of her children to her behavior? How does Little Luther react? What do you think Dory was searching for? Does she ever find it?
18. When Parrot asks Ora Mae if she feels a thing, she replies, "Nope." How true is this assertion? Why is Ora Mae closed up emotionally? How do her circumstances of arrival into the Cantrell family contribute to that attitude? Who else in the novel shares the same emotional ambivalence?
19. Ora Mae views herself as the emotional and physical center of the Cantrell family. Why does she feel this way? Do others share her view? How is Ora Mae a good mother, and in what ways is she lacking as a parent and a role model? How is her conception of motherhood different from Dory's?
20. "Things was not clear in my mind before Parrot," Ora Mae discloses (page 212). What "things" does Parrot clarify for her? Do other women in the story experience a similar turning point after the attentions of a man in their life? Which ones?
21. What does Ora Mae's self-professed ability to see the future affect her? How does it influence her decisions in life, from the time that she was a child to her decisions about marriage and beyond? How is this ability to tell the future itself a form of curse? Do other figures in this novel also believe that they have this ability? Who are they?
22. Which reasons—both public and private—prompt Richard to return to Appalachia? In which ways are Richard's manifestations of wealth and success, important to him? What effect do they have on the people he sees in Appalachia? Why doesn't he speak to Dory, instead taking a picture of her? What events do you imagine are most important in Richard's autobiography (published to "universal but somewhat limited acclaim" (p. 285) )?
23. Why are Dory's earrings such a coveted keepsake? Why is it appropriate that Maggie receives them? Why is Pearl resentful of that? In which ways does Pearl attempt to be different from an early age? What are the reasons behind this behavior?
24. Why does Pearl take Sally into her confidence? What reaction does Sally have to her sister's newfound trust in her? Why does Pearl embark upon a relationship with Donnie Osborne? What are the consequences that result, both for Pearl and her family, and for Donnie himself?
25. Is Little Luther's son Almarine in any way like his namesake? How? How do the two men differ?
26. "Life is a mystery and that's a fact," says Sally (page 275). How does this statement represent a theme that threads throughout the novel? What mysteries remain unexplainable in the book? Who searches for answers to these enigmas?
27. The prologue and epilogue of Oral History appear in italics. Why does Smith set these parts of the book apart? Do you believe that the last part of the novel is real, or imagined in Jennifer's mind? Why do you feel this way?
28. In your opinion, does the adage "blood is thicker than water" apply to this book? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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