Diving right in Smith novel, ‘The Last Girls,’ follows schoolmates on an adventurous voyage through life

The quest story has traditionally been the domain of male characters. Odysseus. Ahab. Rabbit. Huck and Holden.

But where are the women catching in the rye?

It’s a misguided question, says Lee Smith, author of 10 novels including “The Last Girls,” released in September by the Chapel Hill-based Algonquin Books. The linearity of a journey – the straight shot from beginning, middle, end – is the boy story. The girl story, says Smith, is much more circular, much more about the journey itself than about finding the grail.

Nevertheless, back in 1966, when Smith was a student at Hollins College, a women’s school in Virginia, she and 15 classmates got the idea to raft down the Mississippi after reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” They left from Paducah, Ky., and headed the 950 miles to New Orleans on a 40-by-16-foot wooden platform.

Smith, who has made summertime visits to Maine for the last two decades, was already writing her first novel. She also kept the ship’s log and now, more than 30 years later, she has returned imaginatively to the raft trip as a backdrop for “The Last Girls.”

“I knew there was a reason I didn’t throw the log away,” said Smith, who lives in Hillsborough, N.C., with her husband, the columnist Hal Crowther. “I always wanted to use that trip because the details remained so clear in my mind. I can just remember how you feel at night when you look out over the expanseof the Mississippi. I knew I wanted to use it in fiction at some time.”

“The Last Girls” reunites four alumnae from a Hollins-like women’s college, which becomes the launching spot for a similar raft trip and for the idealism that would send them bright-eyed and husband-seeking out into the world. At the opening of the novel, however, the southern women, all of whom have gone on to live rich but less-than-storybook lives, come together to honor a fifth rafter who has died – possibly by suicide – and requested that they transport her ashes down the river and flutter them into the water at New Orleans. Instead of traveling on a homemade vessel, the 50-something friends board a luxury steamboat and make a voyage that transports each woman back through her own life’s journey.

While a trip from point A to point B may seem direct, Smith’s narrative style flashes from one woman’s point of view to another’s and back again. Each character, says Smith, reflects some part of herself. The women consider their husbands (Smith has had two) and their careers (Smith has been a journalist, teacher, mother and writer). They meditate on their decisions and their desires. The story is anything but linear.

It is also not sappy. A tale as retrofitted as this one runs the risk of swimming in a cheap-champagne pool of nostalgia. But Smith, whose earlier books have been sensitive portraits of Appalachian women, is not interested in frothy, fatuous protagonists. She looks back to the last generation of “girls” – the term used to describe her and her friends in numerous newspaper accounts that covered the original trip – with a loving, humorous, sometimes sad and often critical eye.

The struggles they faced were not just navigational, says Smith in a soothing drawl nurtured by a childhood in a coal-mining town near the mountains of southwestern Virginia, where she was born in 1944. They were a waning generation that thought they would be taken care of for life – first by parents, then in loco parentis at college and then by husbands. But the realities, not to mention the myths, were changing rapidly in a country bruised by the Vietnam War, challenged by civil rights and propelled by feminism. They had moved from sleepovers to sit-ins, from bouffants to bra-burning.

To that, says Smith, add this: The “girls” were sparked by the women’s college setting to dream big dreams. Such galvanizing nudges were not unique to the era of her school days but to the powerful momentum behind what used to be called “all-girls schools.”

“I think there’s something very empowering about women’s college and women’s schools,” says Smith, who recently retired from teaching creative writing at North Carolina State University. “It wasn’t about being in college in 1966. If we had met at some other good women’s college or school or camp, we could have made that trip in 1956 or even 1946. We were in an environment where we were being encouraged to think and do things that would be a stretch and to behave autonomously.”

To drive home her point, Smith refers to the book-jacket photo, which depicts a woman making a high dive without as much as a puddle of water or slice of land in sight.

“When I think of the last ‘girls,’ I think there was a profound sense of security,” explains Smith. “There was not the sense that anything really bad was going to happen to us and there wasn’t a single sense of how damn dangerous the river is – which it is! But it became very clear very fast that the things that had provided security, that sense that women would be cherished and taken care of, were really gone.

“Of course, that was something that a lot of the girls on the real raft were already fighting against anyway. They wanted to be independent. Possibilities, opportunities, responsibilities – all these opened up for women and a lot of us no longer wanted the traditional role of the wife. We were smart and educated and very capable and interested in doing things in addition to being married and taking care of children. So things got complicated.”

The complications are at the heart of “The Last Girls,” which has appeared recently on best-seller lists. And while the book may be on a continuum with other works by southern writers, Smith, with this novel, has crossed into broader territory.

“Lee is an absolute icon in the South,” said Maine-bred writer Cathie Pelletier, who now lives in Tennessee. “They see her as picking up the Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor torch. But she’s not just a southern writer. She’s an American writer.”

For Smith, the question of genre has much more to do with story than with regional identity.

“I’m not a didactic writer,” she says. “Each person’s struggle is so terribly, terribly important and valuable. Each person that we see and run into on the street is involved in a great struggle and I would like to honor each person and each struggle.”