The Fires: Latest Reviews

[Andrew Gifford]

Well, today's not only the first day for the forums, it also sees a new review.  This latest is from Booklist:

Book critic Cheuse, whose resonant commentaries are heard on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, returns to fiction after the essay collection Listening to the Page (2001). Cheuse ignites fire in the mind and in the heart in a pair of tightly written novellas (the dialogue volleys as smoothly as that of a play) that form a yin-yang of grief and healing. In the title story, a woman suffering the debilitating hot flashes of menopause journeys to Uzbekistan to collect the body of her husband, who died in a fiery accident, and finds herself participating in a Hindu cremation. In "The Exorcism," a man struggles with his own conflagration of sorrow after his ex-wife, a brilliant jazz musician, dies of a heroin overdose. He then offers sanctuary to their college-student daughter, whose mourning turns dangerously incendiary. Startlingly beautiful in their searing radiance and molten heat, Cheuse's poetic tales of pain and forgiveness, loss and remembrance stoke our age-old fascination with fire as a force of destruction and renewal.

You can read all the past reviews at:  www.alancheuse.com/the_fires_reviews.html

[Andrew Gifford]

The Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-firesbw17nov17,1,5953776.story

chicagotribune.com
Alan Cheuse's 'The Fires'

By Jessica Treadway

November 17, 2007

The Fires

By Alan Cheuse

Santa Fe Writers Project, 117 pages, $10 paper

In "Fires," his new book of two novellas, Alan Cheuse employs fire as the agent and symbol of transformation in his characters' lives. In "The Exorcism," flames set by a college student destroy a baby grand piano, and the event leads the arsonist and her father to explore their grief in the wake of her mother's death. In the title novella, "The Fires," a woman's world turns on end when her husband dies unexpectedly in Uzbekistan and she faces obstacles trying to have his body cremated in a country of Muslims who do not practice the rite.

Cheuse writes straightforward, polished prose, successfully straddling the lines between the horrible and the humorous, and between the catastrophic and the commonplace. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan has been enduring stressful symptoms of menopause and is trying to collect a urine sample for her trip to the doctor when the phone rings, sending the vial flying and making her laugh. After the caller informs her of her husband's death, "she staggered back onto the bed, feeling the dampness between her legs, the legacy of comedy, but the comedy had ended." After she returns from watching Paul's body burn in the Hindu purification pyre a consular official in Tashkent has arranged, she takes a shower and looks in the mirror:

"What a thing to think about! She hated herself. But her hair needed cutting."

For most of the story we inhabit Gina's point of view, but Cheuse includes a chapter rendering Paul's thoughts and experiences up until the moment of his death in a car crash when he falls asleep at the wheel approaching the desert Kara Kum. In this section we learn that during the night, unable to sleep, Paul came up with an insight about difficulties he and Gina had been having in their marriage. In the morning, "He wanted to call her, to tell her something of what he had figured out in the night." But he doesn't have time to reach his wife because of his busy schedule, so we are privileged, in a literary sense, to bear witness to the tragedy of a man's final message to his wife having gone unspoken.

The narrator in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson, drives from Washington, D.C., to Connecticut to retrieve his daughter Ceely from college after the dean has called to tell him she tried to immolate herself, no doubt having chosen to also set a piano afire because it was the instrument her dead mother used to play. The novella is structured as a letter to Tom's energy healer, Erna, whose treatment in the aftermath of Ceely's return home leads Tom to undergo a "cataclysmic explosion" within his psyche, leading him to a new understanding of what, despite the wrongs he has committed, he might still offer his daughter.

Cheuse, author of six previous books of fiction, undertakes as his task in "The Fires" to write about the many permutations of love and intimacy, and the way failure can be redeemed by forgiveness.