![]() ![]() His poems are ferocious, his critical writings are chatty or witheringly technical or both, and he’s also produced-who does this?-several collections of aphorisms. The Scottish poet Don Paterson is kind of a genius. Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated-and so devastating in its conclusion. Lively’s wry prose captures the mundane clarity of Pauline’s life among the wheat fields and the way that a maternal ache, when left to its own devices, can crescendo. ![]() With a gimlet eye, Pauline observes Theresa’s unhappiness and Maurice’s shifty egotism, the amalgam of repression and delusion that seems to hold their relationship together as she fixates on them, she thinks back on her own marriage. ![]() Staying next door-and buzzing at a different frequency-are her daughter, Theresa her son-in-law, Maurice, a smarmy, up-and-coming writer and their toddler. Set in the English countryside over a hot summer, Lively’s slender novel introduces us to Pauline, a divorced editor in her 50s who has opted for an existence “rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions.” Among those satisfactions is the freedom she feels in her summer cottage, unleashed from London, her partner, and her office job. ![]() The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama. ![]()
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