Clifford Browder

Neither the tranquil cover illustration, showing a mother and her little girl walking down a corridor, nor the back-cover blurb of Roberta George’s award-winning novel, The Day’s Heat, says what this work is really about. Yes, set in a small South Georgia town in the early 1960s, when desegregation was meeting fierce resistance, it is concerned with racism, as the blurb suggests. But for this reviewer the central issue is adultery, and not just any adultery. It tells what happens when a mother with two young children and a third on the way, a mother who is a good observing Catholic as well, feels an attraction to her young, progressive parish priest, and he feels the same for her. Lee James, the novel’s protagonist, finds herself trapped in the small Georgia town where her husband grew up, a backwater where only her worldly younger sister will visit her. Lee’s husband Charles, whom she once loved, craves occasional sex but otherwise, a workaholic, comes home tired and sits with his beer before a television screen watching sports. Lee, dark-skinned from her Lebanese ethnicity, has two blond and blue-eyed little girls who take after their father, and is expecting a third child, whom she knows Charles, when he finds out, will not want. Lee is close to the parish’s retired older priest, Father Kennedy, who wants to go slow on desegregation. But in many ways Lee feels drawn to Father Kennedy’s successor, the handsome young priest, Father Palmer, an ardent advocate of change. Against change in any form are her racist husband and his family. Lee’s mother-in-law, Claire, acknowledges the problem with TV- and sports-obsessed husbands, but solves it by playing bridge with women friends excessively, a solution unappealing to Lee. Which makes her all the more vulnerable, when circumstances put her in close contact with Father Palmer. From that moment on, her life is convulsed by passion, joy, guilt, and deceit. This is no bodice-ripping thriller or cheap, shallow tale of romance. Roberta George does not shy away from the vivid details of her story, but she tells it with wisdom and sensitivity, plumbs the depths of her subject, and lets her anguished heroine stay true to her deepest self. The story starts slowly, for we don’t meet Father Palmer immediately, but once it starts, it pops. From then on the reader cannot resist going with Lee on her danger-fraught journey of release and self-discovery. After a season of hope and frustration spiced with a tangle of lies, Lee’s adventure ends quietly, sadly, yet wisely, as it must, but not without a glimmering of hope. A great read; serious readers shouldn’t pass it up. -- Clifford Browder