“The Incendiaries” by R.O. Kwon has already scored a bunch of plaudits, and, you might presume, that it, like many of my recommendations, isn’t in need of my recommendation. You’d be correct, but there is a devoted sect who wait for my monthly recommendation, refusing to read all else, waiting in front of the DBRL blog home page, their finger’s friction eroding their F5 key, until finally those sweet words light up the page and their eyes: “The Gentleman Recommends.” It is for these devoted followers that I recommend reading “The Incendiaries.”
Why? First, because it’s good. But more importantly, because this book demonstrates that cults are bad, and while I may have the charisma, strange hair, and robe collection necessary to qualify as an exemplary cult captain, no one should inspire a level of devotion that makes the devoted willing to hurt people. And while I’d never instruct my devoted followers to do bad stuff, who’s to say that one day I won’t be replaced by a robot, indistinguishable from me save for a lack of compunctions about delegating acts of evil?
“The Incendiaries” is focused on two students attending a wealthy-person college, but only one of them is wealthy. The other pretends to be, thrifting brightly colored polo shirts so that he may raise their collars and layer them in the style of the young elite. He secretly waits tables at an Italian restaurant so he can send money back to his mother for car repairs and whatnot. While Will pretends to be rich, Phoebe pretends to be happy. She’s a gifted piano player who gave up the piano because she believes she’s just good enough to know she’ll never be as good as she needs to be to be truly special. She was driving during the car accident that killed her mother, and she tries to drown her grief in parties and flings. Will became religious as a child, a Bible-toting street corner kid, trying to save souls, but he lost his faith and left his California Christian college for a more secular (and farther from home) east coast campus.
Will and Phoebe have a “meet cute.” One that, depending on your perspective, becomes less or more cute once the book reveals the modest engineering that lead to the “meet cute.” They become a couple. But, like many relationships, it’s splintered once a barefoot cult leader enters the mix.
In the novel’s first pages, you learn that buildings have fallen. In the novel’s middle pages you learn that this cult leader wants to end safe and legal abortion. In the novel’s final pages, Will and Phoebe, two characters who are easy to sympathize with and root for, each commit (different) crimes with which it is impossible to sympathize.
It’s a sad book built from frequently beautiful prose. Here are a few lines I marked with a scrap of adhesive paper so that I could quote them for you in this blog post:
“Once, while hiking with my parents, I’d watched a starling flock in motion, the confusion of birds mobbing about like nets full of fish until they’d lifted, all at once, shape-shifting into a braided coil that flung, agile, whip-tight, into the horizon. Pests, my father said — practice as usual. But I’d thought it an astonishing sight, God’s design made visible, and that was what Phoebe’s playing felt like: the flight of notes rising into shape, a large purpose made plain.”
Will lost a clean faith, one that wanted to make the world a better place. Phoebe gains a poisonous faith, one that leads her to atrocities. To my fanatics: the only faith you should have in me is that I’ll recommend you some pretty good books, and that I have some sweet robes.
