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When First Love Is as Lethal as Religious Extremism
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THE INCENDIARIES
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.
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