A haunting portrayal of faith and its dangers

In her debut novel, “The Incendiaries,” R.O. Kwon writes the most beautiful depiction of broken Solo cups, the unofficial cup of uninspired college parties, I’ve ever read. When her two protagonists, Will Kendall and Phoebe Lin, meet at a college party, Kwon describes the cups on the ground as “punch-stained red cups split underfoot opening into petals.”

Throughout the novel, Kwon’s writing stuns. It shines in the little details and in-between sentences where you’re least expecting to find yourself lingering over a beautiful phrase. Bouncing rhythmic lines such as “a high-bodied bus listed past, piping exhaust” threaten to take off with the narrative. Others make you stop and bask in them for a while: “the nights melting like ice slivers into one God-struck evening.” I found myself wanting to mine these in-between lines and gather them into a small book of poetry.

If Kwon, like her “Godstruck” characters, has a religion, it’s language.

And thank goodness for that, because the characters in the novel are absolutely infuriating. Will, the primary narrator, replaces his lost faith with an obsessive toxic relationship with Phoebe. Although the book’s chapters switch between the stories of Will, Phoebe and budding cult leader John “The Incendiaries” By R.O. Kwon (Riverhead Books, $26) Leal, Phoebe’s chapters are told from Will’s troubling perspective.

At first, Will gives us a problematically romanticized Phoebe, the “bleeding, feverish creature (he) didn’t know how to stop wanting.” As distance grows between them, Phoebe’s narrative also begins to loosen itself from Will’s often nauseating perspective. Phoebe is revealed to be a young-minded woman who has suffered loss and trauma and is flinging herself at anything that might help numb the guilt and pain she feels.

“It’s who I am. I hurt those I love,” she all but quotes from some sort of postadolescent angst handbook. Phoebe soon vanishes once again from her own narrative, becoming a shadowy presence behind the shroud of Jejah, the religious cult into which she tries to lose herself and the pain of her traumas. By the end, she exists almost completely in Will’s imagination.

The cult leader John is also barely a character. His chapters are brief, rarely more than a page long. He appears like an apparition into and out of the story. He feels almost unnecessary, except that a cult needs a leader. At best, he is a figurehead for the more powerful driving forces of the story — loss, faith, selfdelusion.

These shadow characters put the reader at a distance. While Kwon’s beautiful writing draws you in, Will’s warped perspective keeps you decidedly outside of this trio of faith-sick characters. This distance reflects the many losses expressed in the novel.

Kwon, having personally experienced the pull of faith and the devastation of its loss, is gentler with these characters than I could ever be. 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. They are troubled and troubling characters, and they are precisely as comprehensible and infuriating as they should be.

Despite, or probably because of, these difficult characters, “The Incendiaries” is a haunting portrayal of faith — its draw, its loss, its dangers. Faith and loss spark against each other in every interaction of this novel until, as the title promises, eventually they ignite, and what remains is a mess of human lives altered almost beyond recognition.