No Certain Home

Foreword Review: No Certain Home reveals an Agnes Smedley who, though she felt like an outcast for much of her life, became a true revolutionary for hire.

“A citizen of the world,” says writer, journalist, and spy extraordinaire Agnes Smedley: “I’m a freelance revolutionary.” Marlene Lee’s No Certain Home is a fictionalized account of Smedley’s life, one that may take some liberties with dialogue and character motivations but remains true to the timeline of Smedley’s adventurous andcourageous life.

The novel begins in Shanghai in 1937, as Smedley interviews the Chinese general Zhu De. Zhu De’s story is alternated with chapters of Smedley’s biography, beginning with her childhood in Missouri. Born into poverty in the late nineteenth century, Agnes worked from a young age, took care of her three younger siblings, and refined her skills as a hunter, gatherer, and equestrienne. Fueled by her love of reading and a keen intelligence, she parlayed her autodidactic ways into a teaching job in remote New Mexico. Lee conveys Smedley’s sense of independence with a clipped narrative voice that resembles reportage and allows for little self-reflection or self-pity. Smedley is a bracing woman of action. Smedley’s actions are motivated by injustice, inequality, revolution against the rich and powerful, sexuality, and a hunger for knowledge and understanding of the world around her. Lee gives context and grounding to Smedley’s many causes, including her participation in the fight for Indian revolutionaries to overthrow British rule, and her passionate devotion to the Communist Chinese party. Lee also covers Smedley’s inner struggle with sexuality, the idea of marriage, and her eventual acceptance, and physical enjoyment, of men as partners. This internal diversity is all well mapped and effectively conveyed.

No Certain Home reveals an Agnes Smedley who, though she felt like an outcast for much of her life, became a true revolutionary for hire. From pioneer to reporter to spy, and through many callings in between, Smedley had a veritable vagabond spirit, able to be contained by no man, ideology, or political system. Lee’s novelization of this historical figure is as breathtaking as was Smedley herself.

Kirkus Review: Lee (Limestone Wall, 2014, etc.) recounts the story of forgotten radical Agnes Smedley in this historical novel.

From inauspicious beginnings, Smedley is destined for greatness. Born in Missouri in 1892 and raised in the coal camps of Colorado, she becomes acutely aware of the economic disparity that determines so much of what a person can expect from life. After much traveling around the American Southwest, she enrolls in college in Tempe, Arizona, where she meets a woman who encourages her to pursue journalism as a mechanism of political change. “What sort of political work?” asks Smedley. “Help the working class overthrow the capitalists,” replies the woman. “Women’s emancipation. Birth control....Bring about a socialist world.” So begins Smedley’s globe-trotting career as a journalist and activist, a life that involves assisting the plots of Indian nationalists, getting imprisoned in The Tombs in New York under the Espionage Act, and making love to a spymaster only feet from a wastebasket containing a decapitated human head. Interspersed between the chapters covering her younger life are those of an adult Smedley living in a cave among the loessial hills of China, covering the defeated Red Army in its camp at Yan’an. As a journalist, she interviews Commander Zhu De and brings news of the Communist forces to the rest of the world. The two strains eventually catch up with each other and intertwine, as Smedley witnesses the marriage of her politics and her purpose in life, as well as all the trouble those things can cause. Lee’s prose is smooth and her account of Smedley’s evolution is sympathetic and colorful  (During an attack on Shanghai in 1931, Smedley, armed with her notebook and pencil, “walked and ran with Chinese families as they evacuated, lane by lane, just ahead of the Japanese. In the background, bombs, gunfire, and sirens shook the city”). The author adeptly creates scenes that highlight the surreal miscellany of her subject’s life, as when Mao Zedong assists Smedley in ridding her cave of rats. The narration turns overly expositional at times, and a reader occasionally might have preferred to linger in various moments longer. But the book succeeds in illustrating the messiness of the early 20th century, when Smedley becomes simply one person among many attempting to fix the world with little more than her pen and her will.

An engaging tale about a remarkable female activist.

Alex George, author of The Good American: “Passionate, idealistic, and uncompromising, Agnes Smedley was a gloriously unconventional woman whose fascinating life is even more extraordinary in the light of her impoverished beginnings in rural Missouri. Possessed of an unshakable determination, Agnes bends the world to her will and forges the life she wants for herself, undeterred by circumstance, ill-fortune, or anything else. In NO CERTAIN HOME, Marlene Lee splendidly brings to life this most unlikely of Midwestern heroines. A fascinating story, and a wonderful book.”

Stephen R. MacKinnon,  co-author of Agnes Smedley: Life and Times of an American Radical: “No Certain Home recreates Agnes Smedley’s remarkable life in novel form, following closely the story of the real woman.  The imagined dialogue, often based on Smedley’s letters, adds rich texture to the Smedley story and reads like a script for a play.  Beginning with her humble beginnings in rural Missouri, Lee carefully builds a portrait of a self-educated woman who emerged from desperate poverty into an internationally celebrated chronicler of the Chinese revolution. The novelist’s portrayal of Smedley’s emotional life, especially her love life, is powerful.  Lee’s novel gets just right the mixture of the political and personal that defined Agnes Smedley’s life.”

Gary Kremer, Director of the State Historical Society of Missouri: "This is a beautifully and deftly written account of the life of one of the most intriguing women of the first half of the twentieth century. It is also eerily relevant. Anyone who might wonder today how a child of the Midwest could grow up to be a supporter of a revolutionary cause in a foreign country need look no further than the story of Agnes Smedley's upbringing, as told byMarlene Lee. NO CERTAIN HOME is a timely reminder that childhood always matters."  Gary Kremer, Director of the State Historical Society of Missouri.”