When First Love Is as Lethal as Religious Extremism
Fiction
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THE INCENDIARIES
By R.O. Kwon
224 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.
By R.O. Kwon
224 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.
“Think of charm as a verb, not a trait,” Gavin de Becker writes in his 1997 best seller, “The Gift of Fear,” in a chapter on predators. Charm is an ability, not a passive feature, he writes, and it almost always has a motive.
In R. O. Kwon’s radiant debut novel, “The Incendiaries,” her two central figures are the perpetrators, and victims, of the act of charm. They twist against the barbed wire of human connection in an isolating world. This is a dark, absorbing story of how first love can be as intoxicating and dangerous as religious fundamentalism.
Will and Phoebe meet during the still-sweaty first days of the college school year. Phoebe is a Korean-born, California-raised freshman of relative means whose evident sexual confidence ensnares the ex-born-again, working-class Will. Each of their narratives is told in the first person, interspersed with brief chapters about John Leal, a fanatical Christian cult leader whose grip over Phoebe grows in parallel with hers over Will.
The novel is about extremism, yes, but it’s for anyone who’s ever been captivated by another; for anyone who has been on either side of a relationship that clearly has a subject and object of obsession; for anyone who’s had a brush with faith, or who’s been fully bathed in its teachings; for anyone afraid of his or her own power.
Kwon makes real two characters who are, at first, types. Phoebe, in the book’s opening pages, commands with her only-child, rich-girl arrogance, a ponytailed, Korean-American version of the familiar manic pixie dream girl. “I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I’d have no space left to fit my own,” Phoebe says. As her story goes on, the reader learns that she once glittered with promise as a piano prodigy, her discipline now replaced by casual self-destruction after the grief and guilt of being involved with her mother’s death in a car accident.
Will, waiting tables to pay for pâté, lies hopeless next to his girlfriend, consumed. But he, too, transcends his role as the stable, economically beleaguered Eagle Scout, before he falls completely from grace.
Power, along with charm, is also an act in this novel. Phoebe mostly holds power over Will, the wounded enchantress who receives his love. As she slips farther into fanaticism and the arms of John Leal, Will is driven desperately and jealously to his own retaliatory exertion of control.
Kwon’s ornate language adds a creeping anachronism to the chapters. Its metaphors seem accessible at first, but take a bit of parsing: “I lifted Phoebe’s hand; I kissed bitten nails that shine, in hindsight, like quartz, spoils I pulled down from the moon.” Throughout, objects are vaguely animated, as if someone is recalling the story years later: Frisbees soar, oil drips, bare shoulders roll. Early on, “punch-stained red cups split underfoot, opening into plastic petals.”
From Leal’s first appearance, he’s a harbinger of chaos. A former student with a shady back story as a prisoner in North Korea, he looms over the narrative, peppering the shifting, unsettling timeline of the love story. As Will and Phoebe picnic with mulled wine, make summer plans, rent a weekend house at the beach, Leal casts an ominous shadow for the reader, his chapters delivering a piecemeal sermon as he slowly and steadily pulls the young couple’s strings and lays out, log by log, what will be his final masterpiece: a pyre.
As the narrative escalates, the reader goes from a sane friend in a bar, listening impatiently as the storyteller gabs on about a new beau, red flags firing off in her head (Do you not see what’s happening?), to a paralyzed spectator of a five-car pileup on the TV screen. Each horrible act mounts on the others, as Phoebe’s narratives get closer and closer in tone and content to Leal’s.
On top of his pyre, Phoebe — a vessel through which life, or God, has poured trauma, grief, shame, discipline, love, loss of purpose and a desire to please — is splayed. It’s Will who strikes the match.
The action picks up quickly in the final chapters. (Readers may want to skip the jacket description, which contains a giant spoiler.) A wedge has been driven between the young lovers, and Will is left trying to piece together what happened to his grinning, gin-doling girlfriend. The details become sketchy and speculative; the narratives become unreliable.
This unusual novel, both raw and finely wrought, leaves the reader with very few answers and little to rely on. A love triangle between a young man, a young woman and a higher purpose is torched, with few witnesses to say what happened. Unsettled by all the charming that’s gone up in flames, Will and the reader are left alone together holding the ashes, some of the embers still burning to leave scars.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/books/review/incendiaries-ro-kwon.html
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