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  • Guests on Earth: A Novel by Lee Smith
  • Susan Tekulve (bio)
Lee Smith. Guests on Earth: A Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2013. 368 pages. Hardback with dust jacket. $25.95.

At the beginning of this resonant and highly atmospheric novel, the narrator introduces herself as a small, bookish woman who lives in a half-basement apartment in the French Quarter, a humble piano accompanist with a grand story to tell: “My name is Evalina Toussaint, a romantic name, is it not?” She promises to deliver her own impressions of the bizarre events leading up to the mysterious fire of 1948 at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, that killed nine female mental patients, including Zelda Fitzgerald. [End Page 109] But this novel is not another speculative account about the life and tragic death of the legendary jazz-age beauty. This tale belongs completely to its narrator, Evalina. “Cured” of her own mental disorder and living far away from Highland Hospital as the novel opens, Evalina tells a phantasmagoric tale filled with a shifting medley of real and imagined characters who all lived at the mental hospital, and were treated by its founding psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Carroll.

Though set in a mental asylum, this story is less about the nature of insanity than it is a parable about a quietly subversive girl who strives to become individualized within an authoritarian society that forces women to conform to narrow social norms. In its thoughtful exploration of a young woman’s psychological development, Guests On Earth most closely resembles a classic Bildungsroman that mingles the conventions of the literary Gothic tale with historically documented accounts of Highland Hospital. Evalina, whose name means “life” in Hebrew and “little bird” in French, is a classic Romantic waif, a “slight ratty sort of child with flyaway hair and enormous pale eyes,” the daughter of a courtesan from New Orleans. Her journey into womanhood and flight toward self-fulfillment are reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. At the age of thirteen, when her mother commits suicide, Evalina is sent to live in the Garden District mansion of a man presumed to be her father, Mr. Graves. Forced to live among relatives who are cold and neglectful, Evalina starves herself into an emaciated state of near-hysteria. She is sent up to Highland Hospital, a place that is much like a reform school where troubled, and troubling, girls are sent by their parents or husbands, and then retrieved after they are “cured” of whatever nervous disorder ails them.

Most of Dr. Carroll’s cures are subtly authoritarian, geared to reform women, and a few men, who cannot conform to the [End Page 110] societal roles of that era. There are no fences on the premises of the hospital, and the patients are called guests. Dr. Carroll treats his guests to “progressive” healing regimens—rigorous hikes, classes in hortitherapy, song, dance, and art. Beneath the hospital’s genteel veneer, the treatments for those diagnosed with severe mental illness are as torturous as any that can be found in a Gothic horror novel. Sent to the top floor of the hospital, the sick patients are administered electroshock therapy, or given injections of insulin that induce fifty to one hundred hypoglycemic comas over a three-month period. They are released after the doctor confirms that the most profound comas have killed off the sick neurons in their brains.

Despite the sensational aspects of the hospital setting, Guests On Earth doesn’t shock or horrify its reader, mainly because its diminutive narrator possesses a fine mind and a kind, sensible nature. Throughout the novel, her behavior is alternately restrained and defiant. She “loves rules,” but intuitively understands that many of the hospital’s treatments are wrong and dangerous. When first introduced to the fictional character of Dr. Carroll, Evalina rails against him, saying, “I am not crazy. I am not a case.” The doctor agrees that she is not crazy, just “very troubled, and very sad.” He treats her like a guest, offering gentler ministrations in the form of piano lessons given by his wife, Grace Potter Carroll, [End Page 111] in her private living quarters...

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