The Last Girls
In Lee Smith's "The Last Girls," four middle-aged women friends take a riverboat tour down the Mississippi to commemorate the trip they made as college students twenty years ago. Because the story's omnicient narrator focuses on one woman at a time, readers learn bit by bit about the past and present secrets of all four women. Harriet is a lonely, never-married professor who begins dating the boat's "Riverlorian" (river-historian) halfway down the Miss...