Lightning Bug by Donald Harington

Now in her nakedness she stepped through the thicket and slipped into Swains Creek and lay down in the shallow water, and cooled. She loved her body; that was her one certainty; not the sight of it, nor even the feel of it, but the it of it, the itness of it, that it was there, that it was hers, that it could feel something like cool creek water swarming around it and washing the sweat from it, that it could sweat, that it could be cleansed, that it could tingle. I am a jar of skin, a bottle of flesh, a container. All the things I contain...

Latha Bourne is the postmaster of the tiny town of Stay More, Arkansas, nestled in a hollow in the Ozarks. She is forty and still beautiful, having rejected half a dozen suitors--no mean number in Stay More--content, more or less, to live a quiet life, enlivened somewhat by the visit of her niece Sonora and the adoration of a young town boy named Donny. But her lust--the "for life" kind and the regular kind--is awakened when Every Dill, who was in love with her as a child, returns as a traveling preacher. They rekindle their affection for each other, but they find it difficult to come to an agreement about marriage: he won't have sex with her until they're married, and she won't marry him unless they first have sex.

Reading about Harington's work, I saw the words experimental and absurdist come up again and again, and the most successful and engaging elements of Lightning Bug fit this description, especially as soon through the eyes of the sometime narrator, Donny. Donny calls Latha a "lightning bug" because she, like the females of the bug species, flash their attractive lights in a specific rhythm that calls the right kind of male bug to them--a symbol for seductiveness: "The lightning bug, or firefly, is neither a bug nor a fly, but a beetle. I like bug because it has a cozy sound, a hugging sound, a snug sound, it fits her, my Bug." Within the more experimental frame there is another kind of novel, influenced by Eudora Welty and Erskine Caldwell and, maybe, Li'l Abner: a hillbilly comedy that never quite manages to be funny or charming enough.

Ultimately, Lightning Bug is about sex and sexuality; it paints Latha as a woman driven nearly mad by a lust that Every must be persuaded to quench. It has a particular late-60's attitude toward sex as ennobling and the body as the essential site of human experience, of bodiliness as a virtue. But it has a late-60's attitude toward bodily consent as well: Every, we are told, tied Latha up and raped her before running off those many years ago. It's hard to forgive Lightning Bug this detail, which never seems to be taken quite seriously enough, and which Harington seems to want to depict as a symptom of the kind of passionate hysteria that Every should embrace, rather than reject. Much of what I read depicted Harington as a great and underappreciated novelist, waiting to be rediscovered, and to be fair, I chose his first book rather than his most loved or most well-known. Still, it's hard to imagine modern audiences rediscovering a book that deals with rape so nonchalantly.