Book Review/Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger By BILL DUNCAN Reading stories by Lee Smith is to take time out on a summer day with a glass of sweetened ice tea and sit in the porch swing while listening to her poetic Southern drawl telling stories with believable, conversational dialogue. You don’t have to be a Southerner to appreciate this anthology of Smith’s life work, comprising fourteen stories, seven of her best previous stories and seven of her new ones, including a novella. Smith published her first book of fiction 40 years ago and through those stories joined the ranks of the great Southern storytellers, like Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Conner and Fanny Flagg. In this short story collection, you will have to wait until the last story to get to “Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger,” but the wait is worth it for all the great stories in between. My favorite among them is “Between the Lines,” a short story about Mrs. Joline B. Newhouse’s newspaper column, a story that brought tears of laughter because as an editor, I once handled all the country correspondent’s columns and I think I must have edited dozens of Mrs. Newhouse’s columns as she wrote about the 17 families who live in Salt Lick – stories about who gets married, divorced, born, dies, celebrates an anniversary or has relatives visiting from out of town, but as she says “these mere facts are not what’s important to my mind, it is what’s between the lines.” There isn’t a story among the 14, that will not bring the reader tears of laughter, just with the dialogue itself. It is Americana from the deep South, but it is indeed more than that. Each story ends with the reader hankering for more, but one yarn leads into another expertly honed character that Smith has clothed in skin and bones and brought to life. Smith lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. One of the earlier stories in the collection is called “Toastmaster,” about a family’s dinner outing, told though the viewpoint of an 11-year-old who demonstrates his powers of observation. This story is followed by Big Girl, about an overweight wife and her overbearing husband as she works to attain emancipation. House Tours, a midway story, is a hilarious tale about a cynical housewife whose home is mistaken for one on a house tour and suddenly is overrun by a motley group of women. Her characters range from an eight-year-old boy obsessed with vocabulary words, ending with Mrs. Darcy, an older woman who is going through widowhood on her own terms. It has been 13 years since Smith last published. She had already carved her niche with 15 previous books of fiction, including bestseller “Fair and Tender Ladies,” the lifelong story of Ivy Rowe, a woman growing up and growing old in Appalachian Virginia. Smith uses letters to tell the story of this formidable and spirited mountain woman. Another notable book from Smith’s pen is “The Last Girls,” in which four college classmates take a boat trip on the Mississippi, a story told through the eyes of each woman as the old friends weave memories spanning three decades. For the full flavor of this amazing writer, it would be a good idea for the reader to revisit her earlier works. The one outstanding feature of her writing is her mastery of the characters she portrays — so real to life that the reader will swear they have encountered that person somewhere in their own life. (Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.0. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470) 
New and Selected Stories
By Lee Smith
A Shannon Ravenel Book
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $23.95
The News-Review