Published Book by Thomas Benz

January 22, 2019

Review of Roberta George’s “The Day’s Heat”

Roberta Georgia’s fine new novel “The Day’s Heat” draws its title from the new testament quote, “we who have borne the burden of the day’s heat,” is set in a 1960’s southern town which is no stranger to that condition. But the temperature entertainingly rises in more ways than one as the story spreads outward from family to friends and the broader milieu. The main character is Lee Bettlemain, a plucky, quick witted mother of two who feels the ennui of a paycheck to paycheck small town life. She’s forced to contend with a rather obtuse, inattentive husband and some intrusive in-laws. Lee encounters shrinking options as oppressive as the humidity. When fate throws her together with a winsome new priest, Father Palmer, a series of events lead them toward a liberating intimacy.

Lee has a good memory for song lyrics which speak to her plight. She’s lovingly playful with her kids, but like any human being, possesses some inconvenient secrets. Foremost among them is that she is pregnant with her third child, and even though her husband Charles is likely the father, she cannot bring herself to tell him. They are already so financially stretched that she must take in sewing orders to barely make ends meet, and she knows he’ll be appalled at the news. Amid the web of her constricted social world, a series of other secrets, and the subterfuges to hide them, unfold.

George deftly weaves subplots about her big city sister Ray, the troublesome Bettlemain clan for whose company Charles works to exhaustion, the maids who are important sounding boards, the bridge group, friend and confidant, Pastor Father Kennedy, and overall changes permeating Strickland, Georgia in the 1960’s. The story takes place amid the tumultuous desegregation of the era, wherein the codes of one generation are giving way to another, with the church and Lee’s family caught up in the middle of it. And of course, Lee’s clever and plucky navigation of a very volatile situation keeps the main plot humming along.

If she is initially conflicted by her cascading deceptions, she slowly becomes willing to play the game to the utmost, to live according to her own rules and sense of decency. She has progressive ideas about the way the racial calculus must change. She must evade the backward looking judgments of her husband’s family and the pressure to keep things the way they had always been. She always has one more necessary and ingenious ruse up her sleeve. George’s prose is always swift and sure, the observations about southern life trenchant and insightful. She adeptly stokes the flame of forbidden romance and the explosive tension it creates, without a hint of melodrama.

The classes are distinct, with each circling the other warily, even as friendships manage to break through the largely invisible barriers. Though the events of the book take place fifty years ago, their relevance is strikingly modern, as they relate to the current state of race and gender in our society. As the book proceeds to its satisfying conclusion, Lee seems to have vanquished the demons of conscience and social confinement, via her nimble slights of hand, without ever firing a shot.