San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
True believers
“Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” She wrote that this was the common thread in different sorts of extremist ideologies. As she conceived of it, loneliness was the inability to perceive and interpret situations from another point of view, the inability to engage in one’s own internal dialogue, thereby giving oneself over to black-and-white thinking. This kind of loneliness existed in Adolf Eichmann, and it can be found in those who adhere to many extremist ideologies, including violent religious fundamentalism. But what do such experiences of being led, of joining something larger, offer believers that they believe they cannot find in another way in modern society? What is the line between faith and violent fanaticism? How much faith should we put in someone else’s interpretation, as opposed to our own? R.O. Kwon’s “The Incendiaries” is a taut, breathtaking debut novel that explores these questions in miniature.
Told in beautiful, aural sentences that must be spoken or sounded out in the mind, in the manner of poetry, the novel begins with a man’s imagining of a Christian fundamentalist cult watching its bomb going off and felling a building. The why of the bomb unfolds, as do all the events leading up to the bomb, before the story eventually explodes again.
Will Kendall, the man imagining the moment of explosion as well as all the moments leading up to it, is a college student. He transferred to the affluent Noxhurst campus from Bible college, having lost his faith, and lies about his past, which calls into question the rest of the story he’s telling us. How literally should we interpret his words? How much credit should we give to his interpretation?
Will develops a crush on a fellow Noxhurst student, Phoebe Lin, and later becomes romantically involved with her. Phoebe’s mother died as a result of a head-on collision with a truck, an accident in which Phoebe was a driver. Phoebe is feral and self-destructive in her grief: “I drank a lot. In bars, I left full drinks unattended. Then, I gulped them down. If I failed to be careful, she might notice. She’d have to come back.”
Theirs is a tense relationship made more fraught by Phoebe’s burgeoning interest in Jejah, a fundamentalist cult run by an enigmatic half-Korean missionary, John Leal. Leal had previously been kicked out of Noxhurst and imagined he’d never return, but humiliation and his time in a North Korean gulag energized him to start Jejah. Describing his own ambivalent attraction to Jejah, Will explains, “People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn’t forget was the joy I’d known, loving him.”
"The Incendiaries” is a mystery about the soul that eschews easy interpretations. Even seasoned novelists often flinch while writing ugliness, choosing to resolve a dramatic conflict so that the novel roughly conforms with humanist values, rather than set forth the puzzling, unsettling ambiguities of life as it is actually lived. But this novel’s characters feel remarkably natural and organic, as if Kwon came upon this story growing in a forest, and simply pressed it between the pages. Her novel is the better for the invisibility of the hinges and bolts and flying buttresses that must have gone into her profound imagining of it.
Even the tiniest details about these characters are perfect and telling. Phoebe grew up playing piano and wanted to be great. It’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come that she describes a piece of music by saying, “His etude asked so much of me that, at times, I’d forget I had an I. I should have learned, from this, that playing had to be birthed in a place without ego, in which I didn’t exist except as the living conduit.” Her deep desire to lose her ego, to lose her sense of self, and to merge ecstatically with a group also propels her intense quest for faith after her mother’s death. Will’s take on what happened suggests that it’s these desires that allow her to discard her personal prochoice beliefs to join with Jejah’s antiabortion actions.
It’s an interesting and subtly drawn complication that Will’s love for Phoebe is simultaneously sympathetic and shaded with a troubling jealousy of John Leal. We wonder, at least briefly, about how legitimate it is for Will to aggressively try to keep Phoebe from faith, her sole source of solace in grief, and how much his obsession with severing the bond between her and Jejah through a violent act is precisely what drives her much deeper into it. This thread might have been more dynamic had we been brought as close to John Leal as we are to Will and Phoebe, but Leal remains enigmatic. This choice works with the structure since the entire novel is Will’s imagined account of what happened, and his distaste for Leal might preclude his deeper engagement with Leal’s psyche. But the less-is-more approach makes Leal inscrutable, an effect that’s both powerful and confounding.
With each diamond-cut sentence, a close reader can see similarities to many contemporary literary writers in Kwon’s fiction. In its sharp excavation of motivation, “The Incendiaries” calls up novelist Don Lee’s excellent “The Collective,” a novel about four Asian American artist friends in college, one of whom commits suicide. The novel’s capacity to spark meaning through omission and spare, delicate prose is reminiscent of the earlier novels of Vendela Vida and Susan Minot. Like poet and classicist Anne Carson, Kwon is attentive to the evocative nature of white space, and what absence can reveal. But throughout, the novel tends to a fierce consideration of faith and fanaticism that is new. Kwon is a writer of many talents, and “The Incendiaries” is a debut of dark, startling beauty.
Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her debut collection of stories, “Love Songs for a Lost Continent,” will be published in October. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com