Fair and Tender Ladies

As promised a few days ago, I am taking some time to post on Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies - prompted by a little book discussion a few weeks ago.

I first read this book my sophomore year in college as I began to get in the full swing of English major craziness - reading who knows how many books at once. While I love to read as much as anyone I know, it can take the enjoyment out of the experience when you are hurried and simply trying to finish the book just in time to move on to the next one and find an angle for your next essay. It's the eternal ironic dilemma of the English major and the English teacher...when your joy becomes your job.

This book was the exception.

I can remember reading the title, rolling my eyes, and thinking, "Fair and Tender Ladies? Lovely. It sounds like a romance novel or something." I expected hoop skirts, moonlight, magnolias, and all of the other southern cliches many southern lit books deliver. Lee Smith, however, gives us so much more in this novel. Even in the frenzy of mid-semester, I specifically remember relishing the book and lying on my bed a few afternoons in a row as soon as class let out. Once you get to know Ivy Rowe, you can't put this one down, and you are riveted until the tearful last page. As I have come back to it now for the third re-read, I feel a stronger connection to the text every time I read it.

The epistolary novel begins with a young Ivy as she tries to write herself out of her misery in isolated Appalachia where her impoverished family lives. While Ivy suffers a great deal, - hunger, deaths of family members, being denied many things we take for granted - Smith ingeniously allows the reader to sift through all of the expected pity and into the soul of Ivy Rowe. She finds enjoyment in what she does have as her father walks through their fields and tells her, "Slow down, Ivy. Slow down. This is the taste of spring." Young Ivy manages to find joy and even ownership in places that we would not expect in order to accommodate for her seemingly lackluster life atop Sugar Fork. She explains her experience looking down off the mountain to the world around her:

"The whole world was new, and it was like I was the onliest person that had ever looked upon it, and it was mine. It belonged to me. Now it is new for me to feel this as I have not had hardly ever a thing of my own, it is handmedowns and pitching in and sharing everything up here on Sugar Fork, they is so many of us up here as you know. But I looked out over all them hills, and the land was sloped so different from the snow. And every tree was glittering and Sugar Fork black and singing along mostly under the ice. The snow come plum up to my knees. Nobody else had got up yet and I reckon I was the onliest one in the world."

Young Ivy's naivety does not last long as she makes the move down to Majestic and then to the mining town of Diamond where she creates a life of her own and of course a reputation that isn't always favorable. Ivy is not a perfect character as she makes many mistakes that most of us usually find unforgivable. With her, however, the readers find themselves seeing past her discrepancies and straight to the endearing honesty, feistiness, and wit that endears her to us in the first place.

What I find especially interesting is that each time I re-read this novel, I find myself focusing a bit more on a certain phase of Ivy that I perhaps overlooked before. When reading this in college, I adored the devil-may-care sauciness and self-assured attitude that I saw in the younger Ivy as she made a name for herself and fumbled her way through life and early independence. Now as I re-read, I focus on the slightly-older Ivy as she gives a moving description of the birth of her first daughter or settles in to life with her husband Oakley. I know this is a book that I will come back to many other times in life, and my copy is so battered, marked, folded, and bruised that I can find the perfect passage just when I need to read it again and again.

While I am 27 years old and Ivy ends her epistolary story at a much much older age than that, I am already hoping that I too can end my long years with the same sense of satisfaction Ivy does. In her last letter, she describes how life takes you places that you definitely don't expect:

"...how little we know. We spend our lives like a tale that is told I have spent my years so....I have loved and loved and loved. I am fair worn out with it."

What more could any individual ask for as you cross that last bend? Love in its many forms is what makes this novel and this character so enthralling. Lee Smith creates an unforgettable presence that will stay with you long after you turn that last page.