Shreve’s ‘The Stars Are Fire’ burns with intensity
Anita Shreve returns to the mysteries of marriage for her new novel, The Stars Are Fire (Knopf, 241 pp., eeeg out of four).
Like her sensational best-selling 1998 novel The Pilot’s Wife, about a widow who discovers her pilot husband had a second family, Stars explores what happens in the secret spaces between married people.
In 1947 Maine, Grace Holland is the mother of two toddlers in a dutiful but loveless — and borderline abusive — marriage to taciturn Gene, a highway surveyor. A months-long drought leaves their town a tinderbox, and suddenly, much of the coastline is burning. Gene goes off to fight the blaze, leaving Grace and the children to flee their burning home. Grace saves her friend Rosie and the children by burrowing in the surf and sand as flames lick the beaches.
The fires burn out, but Gene fails to return home. Homeless and penniless, Grace moves her family into her dead mother-inlaw’s home and gets a job at a doctor’s office.
A handsome young pianist rents one of her rooms, filling the house with music and Grace with longing.
Shreve is masterful at creating compelling characters whose inner conversations about love and intimacy are both heartfelt and heartrending. As 24-year-old Grace remakes her life as a single mother in small-town Maine, the reader roots for her as she sells jewelry to buy a car, and befriends her kind young doctor boss.
But just like you know the boogeyman isn’t dead the first time he gets whacked in a horror film, Gene’s body hasn’t been found.
As Grace strides toward independence, Gene’s inevitable return looms like a nagging headache.
Gene’s secret doomed their marriage; Grace’s secret could end it. If you know Maine, this novel will have special resonance; its setting is based on real-life fires that raged through numerous towns and hundreds of thousands of acres in 1947.
Even if you don’t know Maine, Shreve’s quiet novel about marriage, duty and passion lingers long after the last page is turned, like the smoke from a wildfire.