The Fires: A Novel - Hardcover

Steinke, Rene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688161502 ISBN 13: 9780688161507

Publisher: William Morrow, 1999

Synopsis

Smoke has as many different scents as skin. Part of the pleasure is not knowing what it will be -- sulfurous or closer to incense or airier and sweeter as I imagine the smell of clouds.

Ella is a connoisseur of fire, a woman enthralled by it as other women are by love. She savors the seductive promise of a spark, the caress of a curling wisp of smoke, the all-consuming hunger of a spreading blaze. Ella's heart seethes with a rage that can be spoken only with tongues of flame.

In her remarkable first novel, Rene Steinke has created a narrator so lyrical and lucid in her madness as to raise the book to the level of romance. Trapped in a sleepy Indiana town, torn by inner demons that drive her to pyromania and promiscuity, Ella is at once entirely original and unforgettably real.

As she struggles to come to terms with her family's tormented past and her own uncertain future, she draws the mesmerized reader ever deeper into her scorched soul, revealing a sensuality that will spiral into final, fiery destruction -- unless it can be quenched by love.

About this title

About the Author

René Steinke is the author of The Fires. She is the editor in chief of The Literary Review and teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

"It is less dangerous to burn things than to save them," says 22-year-old Ella, the protagonist of Steinke's sensitive, eerie first novel. Ella works at the Linden Hotel in a stifling small town in Indiana. She likes to set fires and watch them burn. She also has scars on her torso and legs from a childhood accident that has never been entirely explained to her. But then, much remains unspoken in her family?her grandfather's suicide, old photos of the neighborhood women (including her grandmother) dressed in Klan garments, and the defection from the family of Ella's favorite aunt, Hanna. After her grandfather's funeral, Ella takes a room in the Linden Hotel and tries to locate Hanna, hoping that if her aunt explains her mysterious past, Ella will be able to understand the questions that haunt her own sense of identity. Meanwhile, she checks in on her possessive mother, who has been severely depressed since her husband died when Ella was 15; now, after her father's suicide, she has stopped eating and is wasting away. Ella begins an affair with a co-worker at the hotel, but she continues setting fires as a form of expression?she burns a dress, a book, the garage of a bigoted family. Her need for burning escalates, and she knows it's only a matter of time until fate compels her to set the biggest fire yet. Steinke's rich, sensuous prose is studded with arresting imagery; long, italicized descriptions of fire, flame, and smoke are poetic and mysterious e arly in the novel, but somewhat tedious later when they get in the way of the story. She succeeds in establishing a cool, calm voice for her tormented arsonist, but the hypnotic language keeps Ella at arm's length, and her free-floating anxiety eventually becomes enervating to the reader. Still, there's no denying that Steinke is a writer with potential to burn. Agent, Simon Green. (Mar.) FYI: Steinke is a cousin of Darcy Steinke, author of Jesus Saves.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A debut novel describing a troubled young womans attempts to sort out the truth of her familys past. For children, a death in the family is never a simple affair, but some respond to it more vividly than others. Ella lost her father to cancer when she was 15, and she has been a pyromaniac ever since. What was fire anyway, what was it made of? she wonders. Grief, I thought. First, she set her fires in buckets and bathtubs, but eventually she became a full-fledged arsonist who burned down barns and houses on the sly. Having dropped out of college, Ella now works the front desk at the Linden Hotel in Porter, Indiana, and picks up traveling salesmen by night at the Paradise Lounge. Sometimes she spends the night with them, rarely does she see any man more than once. When her grandfather dies by his own hand (seven years after her father), she decides to track down long-lost Aunt Hanna and break the bad news to her. No one has heard from Hanna for years, and some of the relatives become uneasy when Ella starts asking about her (Were the fires Id set some kind of legacy, some fear passed down in the genes?). In her grandfathers day, rural Indiana had been Ku Klux Klan territory, and, to some degree, Ellas haunted by a history even larger than her familys. When she learns the truth about Hanna, she also discovers that her family has been involved in a deception that she sensed long before she understood. She also realizes, finally, that her impulse to destroy homes is rooted in something deeper than private madness. An intriguing (if overwrought and overwritten) insight into a diseased soul. Purple prose not withstanding (When the Holy Spirit visited the apostles, and their tongues were in flames, did the voice leave ash in their mouths?), Steinke has a knack for the macabre. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As a child, Ella fell into a pile of burning leaves, sparking a fascination with fire that causes her to crave a single flame or a conflagration, depending on her depth of need. Her pyromania crests as she tries to deal with her family's difficult past and becomes obsessed with her long-lost aunt, Hanna. She interviews everyone she can find, hoping to discover why Hanna fled her hometown in Indiana; along the way she turns up even more upsetting information about her family, including her grandmother's affiliation with the Klan. As the past becomes clearer, Ella combines her fire-setting fetish with promiscuity and alcoholism, tormenting herself and the people close to her. First novelist Steinke's terse prose is interspersed with haunting passages describing Ella's love affair with fire. An interesting examination of the psyche of a pyromaniac?not for everyone, but recommended where cutting-edge fiction is popular.
-?Beth Gibbs, Charlotte & Mecklenburg Cty. P.L., NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Smoke has as many different scents as skin. Part of the pleasure is not knowing what it will be ( sulfurous or closer to incense or airier and sweet as I imagine the smell of clouds. Nothing relieves me so much as burning something old, watching it flicker and disappear into air. Dresses dance as they go, lifted as if by some music. A photograph flaps like a wing or a hand waving. Perfumes hiss, then shatter, papers curl, plaster jewels curdle. Once I tried to burn an old toy ( a mechanical duck. When I'd found it at the bottom of a drawer, it reminded me of the groggy sunrise Easter service and the hunt for eggs in the graveyard. After I set the match to its tail, it started walking pitifully on its metal legs, and it knocked around the room singeing the walls and linoleum until it burned down to its metal frame and folded with a crackle and small battery explosion. It is less dangerous to burn things than to save them.

I'd poured myself six thimble shots of bourbon and walked the edges of the bedroom touching the walls and windowsills, hoping to work the starry twitches from my legs so they'd lie still. If I let go, I'd fall off the night that was galloping fast. Every time I got into bed, I heard an intruder finagling the catch on the window or slowly climbing the basement stairs. My heart raced. My eyelids fluttered. I jolted up, walked to the kitchen, ears stinging at the silence, and poured another shot.

The train had gone by three times, rattling into the air. Porter was the kind of Indiana town where the whistle sounded cheerful, not plaintive, but then the wheels chewed ravenously on the tracks.

I listened for the man until he turned phantom again ( the trees, the wind. Ridiculous to be twenty-two, a year past adulthood, and still afraid of stray noises. I went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, turned on the clock radio, and fiddled with the ridged knob until I heard the song about lightning and the crashing sea of love, just at the point when the guitar strummed in waves. My bare feet pressed on the cool, grainy floor; my nightgown bunched up around my knees.

I traced a panicky finger over the constellation of glitter in the Formica ( two nights of not sleeping, with nothing to do for long, bare hours except worry over the crucial thing it seemed I needed to remember and couldn't: that blankness revolved in my head like a siren.

Twirling the salt shaker in my fingertips, I groggily felt that if I acted asleep, sleep might come. Sprinkling a little salt in my palm, I dabbed a few grains into the corners of my eyes before I closed them and put my head down on the table. But when I tried to breathe slowly and think of nothing, I began to crave potato pancakes and apples.

Over the stove hung the cast-iron skillet my father had used to make them, crisp and salty in a way my mother and I had never mastered. After he died, the drinking started ( secretly at first, from sticky bottles next to the flour in the pantry cabinet, and for the same reason I often couldn't steep now: an old sensation that I was falling, or about to fall, from some roof or ledge or stairs.

Bourbon gave me the courage to loosen my grip. It wasn't that I wouldn't fall anymore, but the fall would be pleasant and it wouldn't matter so much when I did.

I was about to drift off when I heard a scratch, a mouse or something, in the pantry. I got up to open the door and turn on the light. The colored boxes and gleaming cans glared back at me. I knew I was hanging on too tightly, but this time couldn't make myself let go.

The landlord had asked me to leave my apartment on Birch Street, and I was staying at my mother's until I could move into one of the rooms at the Linden Hotel, where I worked. There the insomniacs made anxious trips to the ice machine after midnight, and by morning they were already showered and dressed as if there were some purpose to their being awake so early. When they came down to the lobby to check out, their faces swollen and pale, a lostness about them, I'd keep my voice quiet and slow as I gave them directions or simply thanked them and said good-bye. I knew they'd sleepwalk through the day, just as I often did, wincing at light and hoping not to stumble, all along hearing that murmur: if you couldn't sleep last night, you might not get to sleep later, or ever.

I went back to the metal chair and sat staring out the window at the grass, my stomach hollow from all the bourbon. I got up and opened the refrigerator, peered into the cold light. In the lingering smell of leftover cherry pie lay a quart of milk, a hunk of molded bread, a dozen eggs. I grabbed the egg carton and shut the door.

I was going to scramble them, but immediately lost my appetite and just lay them on the table in front of me. I thought of all the people I knew sleeping then, their heads nestled in dreams like those eggs in their cups. I visited each bed, examined the sleeping face, the mouth pressed closed or slightly open, the deep slow breaths or snores, the sprawl or curl of limbs. I wanted to know how they let go so easily, how they managed to spiral so bravely into sleep, unafraid of all they had forgotten.

The dark sky was bluing. Taking the first egg from its bed, palmed it in my hand, shook it just slightly, and felt the weight of the yolk wiggling in its sack. In the gentle press of my fingers, the shell felt brittle and fragile. I tossed it at the window, and it smacked against the blue-black surface, a toy sun. I threw another one at the glass. It cracked and splashed yellow, then dripped sleepily.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Rene Steinke

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688161502
• ISBN 13: 9780688161507
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256