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askylark's review
5.0
I can see why many people wouldn't necessarily be drawn to this book. It's small, introspective and a little old fashion given when it was written. But I loved it. As a mother I appreciated the protagonist's POV. I loved her take on motherhood. And, everyone's family is a little crazy right? This is a quiet book about going home to your parents when your life as an adult is not longer the black and white of your childhood. They say you can't go home again, but there is a sort of peace that you acquire when you embrace your roots. If you're looking for big action, or twisty plot lines, this isn't the book for you. But if you like a book to fall into and walk around inside of instead of burning through, you should read.
gwenmdb's review
4.0
It took me a long time to get through Heat Lightning, and it is very admittedly not a very glamorous book. However, it offers a really interesting commentary on women’s roles and attitudes during the Great Depression (and beyond).
Each of the women’s lives felt like tightly wound rubber bands that were being twisted and twisted to an ever tenser breaking point—speeding toward an impending collapse.
This passage, spoken by Amy to her husband, captures a lot of feelings for me: “It was jealousy... of your being different. Able to escape so easily. Male.”
It’s still a big feeling.
Each of the women’s lives felt like tightly wound rubber bands that were being twisted and twisted to an ever tenser breaking point—speeding toward an impending collapse.
This passage, spoken by Amy to her husband, captures a lot of feelings for me: “It was jealousy... of your being different. Able to escape so easily. Male.”
It’s still a big feeling.
amandaquotidianbooks's review
3.0
An interesting family drama. Well done, but a bit claustrophobic with the weather and social atmosphere. I also found Hull's writing style a bit jarring. At times it seemed a bit stream of consciousness in a spacially disorienting way.
balancinghistorybooks's review
2.0
Helen Hull’s sixth novel, Heat Lightning, was first published in 1932, and has recently been reissued by Persephone. According to the publishing house’s magazine, The Persephone Biannually, the idea for Heat Lightning came to the author when she read the following sentence in a magazine article: ‘Here in America we stem from many races, we have no homogenous roots, no common traditions’. The preface to the volume has been provided by Patricia McClelland Miller, who states that Heat Lightning is ‘at its core, a novel of ideas’. Miller’s informative writing shows the psychology of the characters, particularly of the novel’s protagonist, Amy. She states the way in which Amy is presented with ‘a dilemma common to many of Helen Hull’s characters: how can women flourish when they are expected to make most of the adjustments in situations which really require the efforts of both men and women?’
The novel, set in 1930, begins with Amy Westover, a thirty five-year-old woman, who is returning to her Michigan hometown with ‘a small pyramid of luggage at her feet’. She spent her childhood in a fictional town named Flemington, which she has fled to once more to escape her unhappy marriage in New York. ‘They would all wonder why she had come,’ Hull writes, ‘where her husband Geoffrey was, – and the joke was that she didn’t know the answer’. Despite returning under the guise of resting after a tonsil operation, she admits to her grandmother in an early conversation, ‘Yes, I ran away, alone’. Amy is ‘too thin, too tense, head with dark fluff of hair strained forward… and the dark eyes gave back an anxious stare’. Throughout, memories of her past is woven in, and these come to light when particular senses are affected by what she sees and feels around her – for example, the smell of ‘hot vinegar and spices’ remind her of making pickles on hot summer mornings.
A list of principal characters has been provided at the outset, ranging from our protagonist and her immediate family members to Charley Johnson, Amy’s grandmother’s former chauffeur. This list provides a useful reference point, as a lot of individuals are introduced in a kind of barrage in just a few pages. Whilst we learn rather a lot about Amy as the novel progresses, she still feels like a somewhat distant protagonist. We as readers are her overseers, and we are distinctly not part of her story. We watch her and her actions with mild interest, but there is a kind of barrier which Hull has erected which stops us from becoming too involved or too compassionate towards Amy. The other characters, too, are either not developed enough, or come across as superficial or cruel. Amy’s grandmother, for example, is incredibly judgemental of those around her, and is never scared of giving her often crude and bigoted opinions: ‘Curly doesn’t approve of immigration… No more do I. Too many foreigners. Too many right in our own family’.
The novel deals with Amy’s struggle of how to behave in two entirely different places – one as a responsible wife and mother to the oddly named Buff and Bobs, and the other as a child herself to her parents, who are ‘so familiar, so foreign’. Amy says, when speaking about her tonsils, ‘They leave you melancholy when they go’, which could equally be a comment upon her children leaving for camp, or even metaphorically, with their growing up. She does seem to relax slightly when in her Michigan life, and one touching sentence describes the way in which ‘She took their good-night kisses, still their child’.
Hull’s descriptions of place and weather are the definite strength of the novel. The summer is ‘tucked in at the horizon inescapably’, and the heat of the day was ‘wavering, full of unsteady motes’. Later on, the sun lays ‘metallic fingers at the roots of her [Amy’s] hair’. The writing style is very rich, but the conversations often feel a little stolid. Rather than providing a comment upon life in small-town America, Heat Lightning focuses upon family dynamics, and the family unit as a whole. It also presents a small insight into a relatively early twentieth century marriage, saying of Amy and Geoffrey, ”This past year their attitude toward each other had been a tight-rope on which she struggled, with painful, awkward contortions, to keep her balance. And Geoffrey – he had jiggled the tight-rope’.
Heat Lightning is an important addition to the Persephone list in that it does deal with some growing issues which women faced in the early 1930s – for example, Amy’s disillusionment with her new life and her relationship with her husband, and her cousin Harriet’s lesbianism: ‘My cousin Harriet is awfully modern, isn’t she?’ The novel itself is well written, but the meandering storyline is difficult to engross oneself into, and the characters, even those we know the most about, are difficult to feel compassion for. A sense of momentum is never really gained, and the novel feels a little flat in consequence. It is worth reading for the writing style alone, but the characters are neither strong nor realistic enough to warrant as much love for this particular Persephone title as they are in almost all of the other books the firm publishes.
The novel, set in 1930, begins with Amy Westover, a thirty five-year-old woman, who is returning to her Michigan hometown with ‘a small pyramid of luggage at her feet’. She spent her childhood in a fictional town named Flemington, which she has fled to once more to escape her unhappy marriage in New York. ‘They would all wonder why she had come,’ Hull writes, ‘where her husband Geoffrey was, – and the joke was that she didn’t know the answer’. Despite returning under the guise of resting after a tonsil operation, she admits to her grandmother in an early conversation, ‘Yes, I ran away, alone’. Amy is ‘too thin, too tense, head with dark fluff of hair strained forward… and the dark eyes gave back an anxious stare’. Throughout, memories of her past is woven in, and these come to light when particular senses are affected by what she sees and feels around her – for example, the smell of ‘hot vinegar and spices’ remind her of making pickles on hot summer mornings.
A list of principal characters has been provided at the outset, ranging from our protagonist and her immediate family members to Charley Johnson, Amy’s grandmother’s former chauffeur. This list provides a useful reference point, as a lot of individuals are introduced in a kind of barrage in just a few pages. Whilst we learn rather a lot about Amy as the novel progresses, she still feels like a somewhat distant protagonist. We as readers are her overseers, and we are distinctly not part of her story. We watch her and her actions with mild interest, but there is a kind of barrier which Hull has erected which stops us from becoming too involved or too compassionate towards Amy. The other characters, too, are either not developed enough, or come across as superficial or cruel. Amy’s grandmother, for example, is incredibly judgemental of those around her, and is never scared of giving her often crude and bigoted opinions: ‘Curly doesn’t approve of immigration… No more do I. Too many foreigners. Too many right in our own family’.
The novel deals with Amy’s struggle of how to behave in two entirely different places – one as a responsible wife and mother to the oddly named Buff and Bobs, and the other as a child herself to her parents, who are ‘so familiar, so foreign’. Amy says, when speaking about her tonsils, ‘They leave you melancholy when they go’, which could equally be a comment upon her children leaving for camp, or even metaphorically, with their growing up. She does seem to relax slightly when in her Michigan life, and one touching sentence describes the way in which ‘She took their good-night kisses, still their child’.
Hull’s descriptions of place and weather are the definite strength of the novel. The summer is ‘tucked in at the horizon inescapably’, and the heat of the day was ‘wavering, full of unsteady motes’. Later on, the sun lays ‘metallic fingers at the roots of her [Amy’s] hair’. The writing style is very rich, but the conversations often feel a little stolid. Rather than providing a comment upon life in small-town America, Heat Lightning focuses upon family dynamics, and the family unit as a whole. It also presents a small insight into a relatively early twentieth century marriage, saying of Amy and Geoffrey, ”This past year their attitude toward each other had been a tight-rope on which she struggled, with painful, awkward contortions, to keep her balance. And Geoffrey – he had jiggled the tight-rope’.
Heat Lightning is an important addition to the Persephone list in that it does deal with some growing issues which women faced in the early 1930s – for example, Amy’s disillusionment with her new life and her relationship with her husband, and her cousin Harriet’s lesbianism: ‘My cousin Harriet is awfully modern, isn’t she?’ The novel itself is well written, but the meandering storyline is difficult to engross oneself into, and the characters, even those we know the most about, are difficult to feel compassion for. A sense of momentum is never really gained, and the novel feels a little flat in consequence. It is worth reading for the writing style alone, but the characters are neither strong nor realistic enough to warrant as much love for this particular Persephone title as they are in almost all of the other books the firm publishes.
aemsea26's review
4.0
Was there a new code? What, at the very bottom of her heart, did she believe in? Did it differ, fundamentally, from her grandmother's set of values? Courage, love, loyalty. The scene shifted, but there were no new virtues. Who needed any new ones?
Amy has escaped vague marital problems in New York for the comforting environment of her childhood home in Michigan. Unfortunately for Amy, her visit home is not the relaxing escape she envisioned. As the heat bears down on the small Midwestern town, the family quietly implodes leaving Amy's poor father and mother (the most sensible of the bunch) to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, Amy tries to help smooth things over as best as she can, but she's wrestling with major issues of her own.
Amy is struggling with who she is and how to be: she is a married mother, but she is deeply unhappy and dissatisfied but not exactly sure why. She seeks guidance from her female relatives because she's sure if she just learns the right rules, she will know how to behave. She muses on people's responsibilities and duties to one another particularly when they conflict with one's secret life and responsibility to be true to oneself. She wonders about the shifting nature of self, how it changes depending on your role as parent, child, spouse, or sibling. Even as Amy struggles to understand herself and what is important to her, she sees clearly the nature of her assorted family members, which in turn helps her clarify her own feelings and beliefs.
This was really a lovely book and it was somewhat surprising but gratifying to see that not much has changed in terms of how we understand one another and ourselves since the book was written in 1932. Yes, there are some unpleasant antiquated bits: Italians are dismissed as a bunch of bootlegging immigrants; there isn't much understanding towards the mentally ill; the one lesbian in the novel is vindictive and unpleasant (though so are many other family members). But there were so many perfect little insights:
"A lifetime's too short to find your way about another's heart, without blunderings and mistakes. That's why these folks nowadays are so foolish, rushing into marriage, out of it, into another. They never do anything but make a beginning, and then make the same beginning again. They think there's nothing else, besides that crazy excitement at the first."
"It had been easier, she thought, to live when you knew exactly what you believed, what was right, what you and everyone else should do. But wasn't it ridiculous not to be sure where resentment should begin, not to know whether you were a selfish prig, or -- well, what? -- an injured woman?"
"You can't ever think out a person, coldly, separate from him, because you are different, yourself, when you are apart."
"Perhaps love always ran that course. You loved a man, you lived with him, tried to make a sort of life with him, and you ceased to look at him except as he affected you...You responded to inflections of voice, to overtones, in terms of your own desires and failures. And the man you loved became a sort of scapegoat for the difficulties not in love, but in the whole business of living."
I think the important point is that there isn't a set of rules for relationships; the essential thing is figuring out what works for you: the most admirable characters in the book (Amy's mother Catherine, Felice, Laurance, and even her grandmother) seemingly prioritize their spouses above their own needs and wants, but in the end, they remain truer to themselves than all the other characters in the novel and are ultimately happier.
Amy has escaped vague marital problems in New York for the comforting environment of her childhood home in Michigan. Unfortunately for Amy, her visit home is not the relaxing escape she envisioned. As the heat bears down on the small Midwestern town, the family quietly implodes leaving Amy's poor father and mother (the most sensible of the bunch) to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, Amy tries to help smooth things over as best as she can, but she's wrestling with major issues of her own.
Amy is struggling with who she is and how to be: she is a married mother, but she is deeply unhappy and dissatisfied but not exactly sure why. She seeks guidance from her female relatives because she's sure if she just learns the right rules, she will know how to behave. She muses on people's responsibilities and duties to one another particularly when they conflict with one's secret life and responsibility to be true to oneself. She wonders about the shifting nature of self, how it changes depending on your role as parent, child, spouse, or sibling. Even as Amy struggles to understand herself and what is important to her, she sees clearly the nature of her assorted family members, which in turn helps her clarify her own feelings and beliefs.
This was really a lovely book and it was somewhat surprising but gratifying to see that not much has changed in terms of how we understand one another and ourselves since the book was written in 1932. Yes, there are some unpleasant antiquated bits: Italians are dismissed as a bunch of bootlegging immigrants; there isn't much understanding towards the mentally ill; the one lesbian in the novel is vindictive and unpleasant (though so are many other family members). But there were so many perfect little insights:
"A lifetime's too short to find your way about another's heart, without blunderings and mistakes. That's why these folks nowadays are so foolish, rushing into marriage, out of it, into another. They never do anything but make a beginning, and then make the same beginning again. They think there's nothing else, besides that crazy excitement at the first."
"It had been easier, she thought, to live when you knew exactly what you believed, what was right, what you and everyone else should do. But wasn't it ridiculous not to be sure where resentment should begin, not to know whether you were a selfish prig, or -- well, what? -- an injured woman?"
"You can't ever think out a person, coldly, separate from him, because you are different, yourself, when you are apart."
"Perhaps love always ran that course. You loved a man, you lived with him, tried to make a sort of life with him, and you ceased to look at him except as he affected you...You responded to inflections of voice, to overtones, in terms of your own desires and failures. And the man you loved became a sort of scapegoat for the difficulties not in love, but in the whole business of living."
I think the important point is that there isn't a set of rules for relationships; the essential thing is figuring out what works for you: the most admirable characters in the book (Amy's mother Catherine, Felice, Laurance, and even her grandmother) seemingly prioritize their spouses above their own needs and wants, but in the end, they remain truer to themselves than all the other characters in the novel and are ultimately happier.
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