Fair and Tender Ladies (review)

tially different writer." "In any case," he observes, "the stalagmite in my office has yielded after all a book as personal as a novel or a sequence of poems .... A man appears. It is not an entire man ... it is at least the dressed and honest public-figure, saying a good part of what the entire man believes." In the essays Price examines his own motives as a writer and his artistic intent through a rich and varied career of extraordinary versatility: novels, short stories, plays, poems, translations, and essays. He also reflects on the writing of artists as celebrated as Henry James and Eudora Welty and as little known as the American Indian author James Welch. He gives nodding attention and one formidable essay to "formative heroes "-Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hardy, and John Milton and suggests how they contribute to forming the children of his spirit. And although his mind has roamed vast territories, North Carolina is the heart's home of Reynolds Price. A sure sense of place and love of it shine through not only his fiction but this collection of essays, whether it be around a pond in Orange County, which has been his home some thirty years; the campus of Duke University which both nurtured him and where he nurtures others; or in his memories of the Warren County of his childhood. His essays on the Carter family and Plains, Georgia, ring with the authority of years lived and vacations spent in Macon, North Carolina, where both he and his mother were born. Especially memorable are five essays that are themselves memoirs: "Penny Show," "A Gourmet Childhood" in which he celebrates "the genius of North Carolina country cooking," "Christmas Food," "Real Christmas," and "Man and Boy." He pays homage to "so many extraordinary teachers.' Although he acknowledges that "mottoes like heroes are out of fashion," he celebrates the need for heroes. His own personal motto translates, "Work makes free." Reynolds Price shares his work-his opinions in these essays-freely, emerging from his work as always, a generous man. Smith, Lee. Fair and Tender Ladies. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons and Ballentine. 316 pages. Hardback: $17.95. Paper: $4.95. Fair and Tender Ladies is a book one does not want to finish for the remarkable narrator Ivy Rowe, the world she carries within her, the world she renders, and the world she draws her readers into. A 1989 winner, Fair and Tender Ladies is one of the few works of fiction that has ever won the Weatherford Award as the outstanding book about Appalachia for the year. It is a book that will be outstanding for many a year, a shining achievement like ice sparkling in the sun on a tree from the side of a mountain or the rime that gives luster to a mountain hillside. An artistic tour de force, Fair and Tender Ladies gains strength from the difficulty and the demands of the genre it represents: the epistolary novel. The story is rendered through a series of letters to people in the lire of Ivy Rowe, including many to her long-dead sister Silvaney, whom she characterizes as "a part of me, my other side, my heart," written over a period of 75 years. The letters chronicle events of a better part of the century-national, regional, personal , often ordinary but rendered extraordinary by the sensitivity of Ivy Rowe at each point in her life. She may well be Lee Smith's most memorable heroine among a rich galaxy of shining stars. Fair and Tender Ladies was born at a yard sale "in Greensboro," where Lee Smith bought for a token "the letters of this old woman who had died-all the letters she had ever written in her life." 69 Smith says, "I took them home and read them, and it was just real clear that if she'd had a chance to be educated and not have five children she might have really been a writer of note. She was a wonderful writer. Someone who had married and had lots of children, and she just stayed home and wrote. So many women . . . have been the custodians of culture...