Lee Smith's fourth novel, Black Mountain Breakdown, stands in relation to her first three books … in much the same way that Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, signals in her work new dimensions in vision as well as new stylistic and technical mastery. Smith has moved from her first narrative voice, that of nine-year-old Susan Tobey in Dogbushes, to a detached yet sympathetic and ironic third person omniscient narrator who reveals with equal ease the innermost musings of heroine Crystal Spangler, her "best friend" Agnes, her mother Lorene, her step-father Odell Peacock, and numerous other finely drawn and always interesting citizens of the Black Rock community.

We first meet Crystal when she is twelve years old, as she sits on the shore of the Levisa river, watching the lightning bugs that her friend Agnes expects her to be catching. Although "she could catch [them] … she doesn't; Crystal doesn't...