The Incendiaries, by R.O. Kwon, literary
Summary: Will pretends to be a wealthy college student at an elite university, hiding his real identity as a broke-as-hell Bible-college dropout who’s lost his faith. He meets Phoebe Lin, a bright party girl with her own secret: she feels responsible for her mother’s tragic death. Will falls in love with her, and as his love grows obsessive, Phoebe joins a religious cult whose leader, John Leal, has ties to her Korean family. The group bombs several abortion clinics, killing five people, and disappears. Will wants to find answers: could his beloved Phoebe have killed other people? Where is she?
This is a literary novel but it’s also readable, intelligent, and with the emphasis on obsession, could border on psychological suspense. It’s a book about obsession and God and what it means to love someone who may only exist in your mind.
What didn’t work for me:
The only thing that tripped up my reading was the narrative flow.
Kwon doesn’t tell the story in a linear fashion, as she often inserts flashbacks into scenes. It doesn’t necessarily interrupt the narrative as much as it reflects our mind’s stream-of-consciousness.
We don’t remember in a linear fashion. I think that’s the point Kwon is trying to make in her style. Will expresses a similar thought,
“Time, I’d learned, was believed to be less sequential than it felt. It could spiral; it frilled. It might well halt” (pg. 159).
What worked for me:
The points of view
There are three POV characters: John Leal, Phoebe, and Will. Or are there? Throughout the book, Will dominates and directs the story. Even though Kwon labels certain chapters as “Phoebe” or “John Leal,” it’s not truly their perspective. Will is imagining their perspective. Even with events he didn’t experience first-hand (such as Phoebe’s “confessions” during the cult’s secret meetings), he puts words in her mouth. He imagines her actions, her words, her feelings. He creates her–exactly as he believes he “created” the God he no longer believes exists.
The love triangle
Nope, the third person of the triangle isn’t John Leal. It’s God. As in, the God Will no longer believes in yet still grieves for. A result of his mother’s unspecified illness, he turned Christian in junior high and became thoroughly evangelical: knows his Bible, proselytizes, his entire life dominated by God. But gradually he loses his faith. And when he does,
I should, I think, have told Phoebe how cut open I felt since then, with a God-shaped hole I didn’t know how to fill. If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn’t been able to stop loving Him, this made-up ghost I still grieved as though He’d been real. (pg. 40)
Will trades one god for another and doesn’t recognize it.
- He was obsessed with Christ; now he’s obsessed with Phoebe.
- He grieves the loss of God; now he grieves the loss of Phoebe.
- He’d “made up” a God to believe in; now he’s “made up” Phoebe, projecting his fantasies onto her until the fantasy Phoebe is more powerful to him than the real woman.
The number of friends Phoebe has impresses him. When he points this out to her, Phoebe (or Will’s version of Phoebe) responds,
“Phoebe, oh, I love that girl, people said, but it’s possible they all just loved the reflected selves” (68).
Will loves this reflected self, but he hasn’t realized yet what he’s done.
The masterful characterizations
Kwon does an excellent job showing Phoebe’s despair, grief, and longing for her dead mother. Like Will, Phoebe’s grieving. She’s lost her passion for piano and her mother. As a result, she deliberately courts danger: leaves drinks untended, has unprotected sex, wants strangers to pick her up. “If I failed to be careful,” Phoebe tells us, “she (her mother) might notice. She’d have to come back.” (pg. 48). Is this why a dangerous religious cult appeals to her? It’s an open question.
Will is complicated and nuanced.
He’s as obsessive as any serial killer or stalker in a crime novel.
He’s as unreliable as any unreliable narrator in a suspense novel.
He’s as determined to find answers as any investigator in a police procedural.
See why I say that the book defies easy categorization?
There’s a lot more that I could wax poetic about this novel. (Don’t get me started with the imagery and metaphors and symbols!) But I won’t. Otherwise this review will turn into a thesis, and I’ll expect you to give me a grade and smiley-face sticker on it.
If you enjoy literary-style novels, then you might enjoy the book.
It’s compulsively readable, and only a little over 200 pages, so it’s not going to dominate your entire reading time.