[b:The Incendiaries|36679056|The Incendiaries|R.O. Kwon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1512834150s/36679056.jpg|55674919] is filled with good writing, with metaphors and sentences that sing on just about every page, perhaps even getting in the way of the story. Details (food, alcohol, clothing, decor, cell phones) are stunning. The key characters are three, two men and a young Korean American woman attending a posh East Coast college. One of the men, John Leal, becomes seduced by religion and a pro-life cult out of North Korea, eventually ensnaring Phoebe in Jejah with their increasingly violent plans for domestic terrorism. Most of the book is told by the left-behind lover Will who commits an unforgivable transgression against Phoebe spurring her departure. Odd things pop up, like a long list of names of the infant dead noted in a graveyard. As Crystal Paul writes in the Seattle Times: She does not let her characters off the hook for their detestable behaviors, but she does not villainize them beyond human recognition either. They blow up buildings, manipulate and hurt people, sometimes navel-gaze to an eye-rolling degree. They are troubled and troubling characters and they are precisely as comprehensible and infuriating as they should be.Not an easy read, it kept my interest as do most books of masterful writing.
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/the-incendiaries-is-beautiful-a... ( )

So much I didn't like about the book--the preciousness toward Phoebe, her piano playing (and many other elements) as a device more than anything else, a story set at college with almost no academics, the writing getting a little self-conscious at times. BUT sometimes the language was just beautiful, and the central questions about faith are dealt with in a way I have rarely seen. I like the ambiguity of what Leal is doing and how--that Will almost gets sucked in but doesn't while Phoebe does. I appreciate the level of difficulty Kwon goes for here, as well as her portrayal of multiple Korean Americans. ( )

Having sex with someone who does not want to have sex with you at that moment, regardless of how many times they've wanted to have sex with you in the past, is NOT OKAY.
Very amazed at how that was just glossed over.

I think this was trying to be literary and I only like literary things when they're literary because they're just darn gorgeous. I could feel the trying here. I likely would not have finished this if it hadn't been the only physical book I had with me at an outdoor concert. Like okay, having no quotation marks can be a really intriguing literary device, but in this it was just really gosh darn annoying.

Also, someone asked me what I was reading and thought this was David Foster Wallace. Am amused. ( )

The setting: Edwards College, in the fictional town of Noxhurst on the River Hudson, in an unspecified year some time after 2001. The main characters: John Leal, once a prisoner at a North Korean gulag, now the charismatic leader of a Christian cult of hand-picked followers; Phoebe, a lapsed Korean-American piano prodigy and a student with a penchant for party-going who, unexpectedly, falls under Leal’s spell; Will Kendall, her boyfriend, who has enrolled at Edwards from Bible college after losing his strong Evangelical faith.

The novel turns the narrative on its head, presenting us at the very start with the most momentous episode in the story, a terrorist attack in which Phoebe is clearly implicated. We’re told that “Buildings fell. People died.” Will, shocked, tries to understand what could have led to all this.

As plots go, there’s little else of import apart from what the blurbs and the above brief summary reveals. In some aspects, the novel is stingy with narrative details. To be honest, the underlying themes of “The Incendiaries” are not exactly new, either. The “student on the fringe” who doubles as narrator is a recurring trope in college fiction, as is the “crush on the popular girl” – think of Donna Tartt’s [b:The Secret History|29044|The Secret History|Donna Tartt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451554846s/29044.jpg|221359], or [b:The Virgins|17214288|The Virgins|Pamela Erens|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1360650549s/17214288.jpg|23697951] by Pamela Erens. Even the central image of the “God-shaped hole”, which Will repeats through the narrative as a symbol of his loss of faith, is not exactly original – attributed to Salman Rushdie, it’s an evocative metaphor which has since been regularly quoted and misquoted.

Yet, the praise for this debut is justified. Indeed, I felt that Kwon has managed to assemble a bunch of commonplaces and turn them into a gripping, thought-provoking book which is also, palpably, “hers”.

Take its deceptively simple structure. The novel is split into forty short chapters, in which the narrative voice alternates between Will, Phoebe and Leal, making the novel compulsively readable. Soon, however, we realise that, in fact, there is but one narrator – Will – who, in an exercise of imaginative empathy, tries to give voice to the other characters. This might explain why the chapters on the enigmatic Leal are the shortest. Phoebe’s are partly based on a private journal which Will gets his hands on and are, as a result, longer and more detailed. But can we really trust Phoebe’s narrative as mediated through her lover?

Will, in fact, is the classic unreliable narrator. He has a love-hate relationship with the faith he has lost. He still thirsts for it, and yet is ashamed of his evangelising years and, by association, of his upbringing and his past. Will has no compunction about lying as a means to reinventing himself. He admits at one stage "I wish I hadn’t lied to you Phoebe, but with anyone else, if the option came up, I’d do it again". If Will takes pains to hide his past, can we be sure about his portrait of Phoebe? Are his motives as honourable as he makes them out to be? These are just a few the many doubts which Kwon tantalisingly raises for us to try and address.

More challengingly, the novel asks questions which go beyond the narrative. Jejah, Leal’s group is first presented as just another Christian religious gathering and only later is it explicitly described as a “cult”. Will, wary of religion and pained at his loss of faith, does not really distinguish between ‘mainstream’ religious movements and ‘cults’ – his anger seems to be equally directed against the two. But the novel, at the same time, does imply that there is a difference, albeit one which can, at times, be tenuous indeed. Significantly, in “The Incendiaries”, there seems to be an underlying comparison between love and religion/faith, with the extremism of cults finding a parallel in the excessive possessiveness which can taint first loves. The final chapters even suggest that Phoebe might be a personification of the faith Will has lost – a reading which would add a symbolical layer to the novel.

Kwon has stated that she was raised as a Roman Catholic and that, like Will, she is still, despite herself, grieving for the beliefs she has since abandoned – perhaps giving credence to Cordelia’s (rueful?) statement in “Brideshead Revisited” that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”. The Incendiaries can, in fact, be read as a meditation on faith – its comforts and its challenges, its fruits and its dangers, its allure and its loss. At the heart of this novel is a cult with a warped expression of religion. Yet I have no qualms about considering “The Incendiaries” as a religious novel. Nor about recommending it to fellow readers, whether believers, non-believers or in-between.

Read more at http://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2018/08/losing-ones-religion-incendiaries-by-r... ( )

Will and Phoebe meet at fictional Edwards College on the US East Coast and form a relationship. Will has recently experienced a loss of faith. Phoebe feels responsible for her mother’s death. John Leal, who claims to have been incarcerated in a North Korean gulag, takes advantage of Phoebe’s insecurities to lure her into his cult. Will is suspicious of John and protective of Phoebe. The cult engages in increasingly bizarre and violent activities.

This writing is strong, especially for a debut, but the story itself is extremely disturbing, a bit too disturbing for my taste. It purports to be an examination of faith but there is little introspection. The reader wants to understand Will’s decision, but what little is provided seems inadequate. Phoebe’s gradual absorption into the cult feels more convincing but there is a problem with the narrative voice. The story is told by Will, and Will interpreting Phoebe’s views (and Will interpreting John’s views), but this robs the reader of grasping their true beliefs. We only see Phoebe and John through Will’s lens.

According to the blurb, “The Incendiaries is a fractured love story and a brilliant examination of the minds of extremist terrorists.” The problem is that it does not examine the ‘minds of extremist terrorists’ when it is written from the perspective of a non-terrorist. It did not work for me. I almost did not finish, but it is short. Content warnings include terrorism, rape, and suicide.
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