On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a
picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft
(inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls
A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky,
paper.Thirty-five years later, four of those girls reunite to cruise the
river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of
Natchez, and there's no publicity. This time, when they reach New
Orleans, they'll give the river the ashes of a fifth rafter-beautiful
Margaret (Baby) Ballou.
Revered for her powerful female characters, here Lee Smith tells a
brilliantly authoritative story of how college pals who grew up in an
era when they were still called girls have negotiated life as women.
Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't
explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to step away from
her Southern Living-style life. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is
suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous
romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And
finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury-along with their
memories of her rebellions and betrayals.
THE LAST GIRLS is wonderful reading. It's also wonderfully revealing of
women's lives-of the idea of romance, of the relevance of past to
present, of memory and desire.
