“Blue Marlin” by Lee Smith.  Durham, NC:  Blair-Carolina Wren Press, 2020, 123 pages, $15.95

This slight novella by North Carolina author Lee Smith is a little pocket gem that can probably be read in one-sitting by most readers.  The year is 1958 and 13-year-old Jenny Dale is obsessed with growing up, movie stars, surveilling the neighbors on her bicycle, and puzzling over grown-up relationships.  As a child of her parent’s middle-age, Jenny spends much time amusing herself because she is the only one of her sisters still at home.

Because of her solitary jaunts around town, Jenny is the first to suspect that her attorney father has begun an affair with Carroll Byrd, a painter newly arrived in town who has inherited the family home of her deceased father.  Carroll has an artistic temperament, strong features, and ways that are foreign to the rural Virginia town and the Dale family’s small-town Southern lifestyle.

Jenny’s blonde, bridge-playing, former Debutante mother Billie suffers an emotional breakdown when she learns of the affair by not being able to locate her husband during a family crisis.  Billie’s ne’er-do-well brother dies unexpectedly and her husband’s cover story of a trip to a hunting cabin implodes when he can’t be found after the death.

The aftermath of this tense family situation results in Jenny being shipped off to loud and unfashionable cousins in South Carolina so that her parents can work on their marriage.  Just when she’s starting to warm to her big-boned cousin Rayette, Jenny’s parents swoop down to take her on a “family” road trip vacation to Key West, Florida. 

The car trip is punctuated by bad feelings and long silences until the arrival at the Keys when the Dale family finds that they are unexpectedly staying at a motel being used by the movie crew filming “Operation Petticoat”, a war movie featuring a pink submarine.  Running into the stars of the movie, Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, becomes a preoccupation of Jenny and her mother.

 Finally, a family thaw and truce are negotiated when father John Dale agrees to participate with his wife and daughter in a movie crowd scene to welcome the submarine back to port.  As daughter Jenny quips, “The geographical cure worked. Mama and Daddy would go home refreshed and stay married for the rest of their lives.”

Not all dysfunctional family stories end so well, but this one rings true—even down to Jenny’s adolescent crush on her young brother-in-law reminiscent of the Southern literature classic “Member of the Wedding” by Carson McCullers.  This is a charming story of adolescent awakening that will find a wide audience among those nostalgic for a gentler era.

Lisa Kobrin was the Reference Services and Local History Librarian for the Alamance County Public Libraries. She served in this position for 32 years, and retired on April 1. We will miss Lisa’s book reviews as well as her presence.