Not surprisingly, given Lee Smith’s body of work, her new novel, “Guests on Earth,” is much more than advertised.
Greatly anticipated as a look into Zelda Fitzgerald’s fire-consumed stay at Highland Hospital in Asheville, it resonates most of all as a cry of love for society’s misfits.
The book’s first epigraph is a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his and Zelda’s daughter, Scottie: “The insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”
In this era of defunded mental health facilities, people’s hearts need to be prompted to ache.
The first of the book’s innocent unfortunates is the narrator, Evalina Toussaint, whose story of how she came to Highland fills the first chapter, and is an example of Smith’s distinctive, fertile, life-inventing imagination.
Smith presents her novel at Malaprop’s Bookstore at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Un-put-downable
When Evalina, as a child, refuses to eat and burns her arm with matches, it does not seem like an over-reaction. Her mother, an exotic dancer in New Orleans’ French Quarter, has committed suicide after a baby born to her and her aristocratic lover died; and, subsequently,
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