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A review by aurigae
The Arsonist by Sue Miller
4.0
I quite liked The Arsonist. Others have objected to its slow pace and meticulous attention to detail, and those are valid descriptors - but I don't consider them negative. The book isn't particularly long, and I found it quickly engrossing.
The story centers around three characters: Frankie, who is having a midlife crisis of sorts; Sylvie, her mother, who is struggling to manage retirement; and Bud, a local newspaperman with whom Frankie begins an affair. Each of them is struggling to define what gives their lives meaning, sometimes in relation to each other. The backdrop is a series of fires in the small town where they live.
It's true that the fires are not given the attention that the book's title (and the inherent drama of a town under this sort of siege) suggest. Miller is more focused on the drama of three ordinary people trying to assemble lives for themselves, and perhaps that is a smaller drama. In fact, this is a lot of what the book is about: what constitutes a big story or subject? Famine in Africa or fire in a small town? A sick parent or an abandoned child? Is a life of possibility inherently bigger than a life of specifics?
The main failing of this book, in my opinion, is that the author doesn't quite answer her own questions. She never tells us, really, who the arsonist is. There are some vague symbolic parallels between the fires and the other events of the story, but their potential is largely unexplored. In the final chapters of the book, I was eagerly awaiting what I hoped would be a powerful resolution to the carefully assembled drama - but in the end, Miller pulled her punches, and although much of the novel was powerful and absorbing, the final pages fell flat.
The story centers around three characters: Frankie, who is having a midlife crisis of sorts; Sylvie, her mother, who is struggling to manage retirement
Spoiler
and her husband's rapidly encroaching dementiaIt's true that the fires are not given the attention that the book's title (and the inherent drama of a town under this sort of siege) suggest. Miller is more focused on the drama of three ordinary people trying to assemble lives for themselves, and perhaps that is a smaller drama. In fact, this is a lot of what the book is about: what constitutes a big story or subject? Famine in Africa or fire in a small town? A sick parent or an abandoned child? Is a life of possibility inherently bigger than a life of specifics?
The main failing of this book, in my opinion, is that the author doesn't quite answer her own questions. She never tells us, really, who the arsonist is. There are some vague symbolic parallels between the fires and the other events of the story, but their potential is largely unexplored. In the final chapters of the book, I was eagerly awaiting what I hoped would be a powerful resolution to the carefully assembled drama - but in the end, Miller pulled her punches, and although much of the novel was powerful and absorbing, the final pages fell flat.