Review: Fires

Sex, drugs, cigarettes, violence and suffering.



"..We'll burn your house down, don't it feel so good,
There's a forest fire every time we get together."

Written while the author was still at Yale, Nick Antosca's Fires offers up a fresh and compelling take on the campus novel. Confident, beautifully seductive prose takes the reader through those dark halls of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and out the other side into James Salter territory, a similarity noted not only by Antosca's professor John Crowley on the book's jacket ("reminiscent of James Salter in its combination of a cool unforgiving eye and a hot intensity of feeling an sensual immediacy") but acknowledged by Anotsca himself: "I was struggling to write seriously about sexual obsession and [Crowley] thought I should read someone who actually knew how to do it...You can learn from Salter's work. Not just about how to write but how you might prefer to live."

Following Salter's blueprint of living then, Nick Antosca's Fires blends jealous love-triangle with literary thriller, ending in heart-felt apocalyptic rage; an altogether potent mix which, in the hands of some writers, could either explode in their faces or fizz out without much of a bang. Instead, Fires is an unsettling, triumphant read.

A deft two-hander—on the Ivy League campus and back home in Bondurant—Jon Danfield's relationship with Ruth first flourishes, then turns obsessive while back home "dry lightning storms have whispered across Maryland and Virginia, igniting undergrowth, birthing infant forest fires that have become monstrous in adulthood." Tinderbox landscapes, glowing ashes, a brother "soaked with lighter fuel and set on fire," "the clock radio says mountains are on fire," inferno.

These striking images consume the pages. Danfield says, "a forest fire can't eat a town, a place of asphalt and concrete and glass. What it can destroy are suburbs." And it is to the suburbs Antosca takes the reader for the second, and more satisfying, half of the story—the suburbs where houses are museums, their contents artefacts and where a boy has been discovered in a basement, kept captive there for eight years by a teacher.

"We're all the sum of our histories. The places we've lived, the people we've known, the things we've possessed and lost. We're made out of those things, with wild cards. You can sometimes look back on your life and see what you're made out of, figure out where parts of you come from—and for me, all those parts come from one place."

Antosca's Fires is a story mapped out in cigarettes. Not only do days with Ruth "go by in long lazy ribbons of cigarette smoke and sex and snatches of sleep," but the characters are subtlety defined the brand they smoke: for the New York prep school girls it's Gauloises ("I was shocked when I found out people actually smoke those; I thought it was only in novels, and even then only French homosexuals"); Jon Danfield Kamel Reds; for Ruth's ex and Danfield's rival James it is Lucky Strikes; "Zack offers me a cigarette, but he's smoking French things that smell like gerbils and I wave it away." And in a particularly charged scene between Jon and James, "We take out cigarettes and I light mine off his (a kiss by fiery proxy)."

Literary devices aside, it is Antosca's prose that is to be relished. The narrative structure in Fires is pretty straightforward, told in a linear fashion. But his words... An eery, surreal cinematic quality lends itself to the novel as a whole, conjured up so well by Antosca (it should come as no surprise to discover that he studied film at university). Some of the scenes in the book are visually very stunning—the deer wandering around the deserted town, the scene with the kabuki mask—and will linger long after you put the book down. Don't be surprised if Fires is not only optioned at some stage, but goes on to burn up Sundance.

[ST]

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Fires by Nick Antosca
Impetus Press, 2007
194 Pages