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Lightning Bug
Lightning Bug (1970) is the first of Donald Harington’s novels set in Stay More, the fictional Ozark town that provides a setting for all twelve of the subsequent novels that he would publish before his death in 2009. The novel introduces the reader to Latha Bourne, the “demigoddess” of Stay More, the undying muse who reappears throughout his work as an embodiment of beauty and spiritual freedom.
Lightning Bug also represents Harington’s first effort to overcome a confounding lack of success in the American fiction market, following up on his first published novel, The Cherry Pit (1965), which was shortlisted for a prestigious first-novel award that eventually went to Cormac McCarthy. His second effort to make a splash on the literary scene was a manuscript completed in the late 1960s called A Work of Fiction, a novelistic treatment of the life of Civil War general and Freemason Albert Pike, which the young author shopped unsuccessfully to publishers while enduring a series of frustrations with multiple literary agents; it never saw print.
When he shifted to Lightning Bug (which he originally planned to call Sounds of a Summer Night), Harington was turning the clock back to his childhood memories of Drakes Creek, a small Ozarks town in Madison County where he fell in love with the language and linguistic sensibilities of the “mountain folk” (a term he preferred to “hillbilly”) during his summer getaways from his hometown of Little Rock (Pulaski County). The novel lavishes its greatest care on the playful, idiosyncratic, homespun dialect of the people that the young Harington grew to love particularly through the stories they told him, in the years before he lost his hearing.
The novel establishes two essential characters of the Stay More canon: Donny (sometimes rendered phonetically as “Dawny”) and Latha Bourne. Six-year-old Donny lives in Little Rock but spends his summers in the Ozarks with relatives. More importantly, he spends as much time as possible with Latha, Stay More’s postmistress and the proprietor of one of its two general stores. Donny is hopelessly in love with Latha, and the novel sometimes switches from his perspective as a child to that of the adult novelist, seeking information about Latha’s years in the mental health ward of the state hospital about a decade before the main events of Lightning Bug occur.
The main plot of Lightning Bug tells of the return of Latha’s long-ago suitor, Every Dill, after an absence of a couple of decades. Latha has lived alone since her return to Stay More, and Every’s reappearance awakens old and mostly painful memories both for her and for the town at large. Complicating matters, Every reappears simultaneously with a man named Dolph Rivett, whom Latha has recently met while out fishing and misled with false information about herself; Dolph tracks her down and declares that he plans to marry her. The appearances of Every and Dolph on Latha’s store porch prompt several interludes from previous timelines in the course of the narrative, ranging from a few weeks previous for the fishing tryst with Dolph, to eighteen years before, when Every was run out of town by the family of Latha’s high school beau, Raymond Ingledew.
Another key character in the novel is Latha’s niece, Sonora, who, like Donny, comes to Stay More every summer to escape Little Rock, where her relationship with her mother (Latha’s sister) and father is not close. Sonora’s presence draws the young men of Stay More to the store every evening, where the sounds of their quarrels over Latha’s attention mingle in Donny’s memory with all the other sounds of the summer night.
Donny is the key to the novel’s ability to blend both the many sounds of the summer night and the many timelines from across the decades of Latha’s life. It is Donny who intuitively connects the intrigues between Latha and her rival suitors with the intrigues between Sonora and her rival suitors, building a world in which heady romantic love inspires bold, often dangerous ventures. It is also the experienced novelist’s sensibility that manages to tell of Latha’s mysterious escape from the Little Rock asylum and her eventual return to Stay More. And it is the same mature perspective that deftly handles the seemingly irresolvable conflict between Every’s staunch religious principles and Latha’s equally staunch commitment to her own freedom from any form of external control, interpersonal or religious. The novel, in fact, includes a dream dialogue between Latha and an Ozarkian Jesus that quickly becomes a sprightly musing on the nature of love.
But all of these developments within the adult novelist’s perspective are grounded in the child avatar’s undying love for Latha. The final stages of the novel find Donny loose in the woods above Stay More, fleeing violence and shame, prompting the entire town to go out in search of the frightened child who will, someday, become their chronicler. As would become another of his trademarks, Harington shifts tenses in these latter stages of the novel, from past to present and finally to future, immersing the culmination of the search for Donny in a shimmer of hypothetical possibility, the child’s rescue left to the imagination of the reader as much as it is to the literal mechanics of plot. Donny’s getting lost in the woods becomes part of his consuming fidelity to Latha, and it sparks in turn the town’s concern and commitment to him.
Harington’s editor at Harcourt was so pleased with the book and some of the enthusiastic pre-publication responses it received that he ordered a second edition before the first had even been published. The move proved premature, with the first run never selling out. The novel had won over popular children’s novelist Roald Dahl, who wrote a rave report on it, and actress and fellow Arkansawyer (to use Harington’s preferred term) Mary Steenburgen, who wanted to play Latha in a screen adaptation and who would appear at an award ceremony for Harington decades later to read some of her favorite passages. But these and other warm responses in the end only made the book’s failure to sell well all the more painful for the author, who would say in interviews that its lack of sales made him decide that he would just double down and keep writing about his little Ozark town until someone finally noticed. Lightning Bug was reissued by Toby Press in 2005.
For additional information:
Harington, Donald. Lightning Bug. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Brian Walter
St. Louis, Missouri
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