Heat Wave, by Penelope Lively

My first book for this year's TBR Pile Challenge was Heat Wave, by Penelope Lively.  This is my first Lively novel and I found it absolutely compelling, well-written, and thought-provoking.

It is very tight, very taut book.  Taking place between May and August, entirely in the English countryside, with but a handful of characters, the focus is intense and the tension palpable.  As the summer progresses, and the heat wave consumes the wheat as well as the people, the plot folds in upon itself until everything explodes with the thunderstorm that ends the story and the heat wave.

Pauline is a fifty-five year old divorced editor, living in one of two cottages she owns.  The other cottage is inhabited by her daughter, Teresa, and her husband, Maurice, and their son, Luke.  The story is told in the present tense and entirely from Pauline's perspective.  Her ex-husband Harry, Teresa's father, was charming but pathologically unfaithful to her.  She is in despair as she suspects that Maurice is following the same path that Harry did, and she frets about what to do.  To tell her daughter, to scold Maurice, to mind her own business, to grieve her own lost marriage?  She thinks about maternal instinct--the need to protect one's young even when they aren't young anymore.  She thinks about betrayal and love and fate and patterns that repeat.

Heat Wave is a wonderful literary novel--I got to exercise my English major brain and note how Lively used nature to parallel her plot and increase the tautness of the narrative.  If Heat Wave is representative of Lively's writing, then a fan is born.  I think I'll a get copy of her Moon Tiger next.

Mailbox Monday

Mercifully, I haven't received much lately...I've been really trying to make a dent on the TBR shelf, but paperbackswap.com just makes it so easy to acquire more.

Anyway, I did receive two new books that I am eager to get to.



I enjoyed Jospehine Tey's The Daughter of Time so much that I ordered her Miss Pym Disposes. The description on Amazon sold me:

Miss Lucy Pym, a popular English psychologist, is guest lecturer at a physical training college. The year's term is nearly over, and Miss Pym -- inquisitive and observant -- detects a furtiveness in the behavior of one student during a final exam. She prevents the girl from cheating by destroying her crib notes. But Miss Pym's cover-up of one crime precipitates another -- a fatal "accident" that only her psychological theories can prove was really murder.

On another book blog I learned about Penelope Lively's A House Unlocked, and got a copy for my sister's birthday and then I couldn't get resist getting a copy for myself so that we could chat about it this winter, hopefully at Christmastime.

Again, cutting and pasting from Amazon:

Whitbread Award and Booker Prize-winning novelist Lively's latest book is a mixture of autobiography and social history. The house in question is Lively's ancestral home Golsoncott in Somerset, England, acquired by her grandparents in 1923. In 1995, when the house had to be disposed of, its familiar objects spoke elegiacally of a way of life that had changed in the intervening years. The figures on the embroidered sampler, for instance, recorded the effect of historical events like the Blitz, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust on the inhabitants of Golsoncott; the potted meat jars served as a mnemonic for the state of the Church; and the bon bon dish evoked a social class served by domestic servants. Lively's writing is a palimpsest of past and present on which flit scenes of England's changing mores and rituals. Add to this a narrative graced with fictional elements and felicitous prose and the result is, to borrow Lively's own phrase, "a rattling good read," as absorbing as any of her novels.