The Incendiaries
Ratings45
Average rating3.3
DNF at 52%, no rating.
Someone else said that trying to get to the plot of this book felt like swimming through Jello, in my opinion it was pretty much spot on. It's a short book and I'm a fast reader and still it was a sluggish read while also being somehow hard to follow (often felt like there were pages missing and like I was going no where). Couldn't make myself care about the characters all that much. It has its moments for sure but it really wasn't for me.
*2.5 stars, I guess. This one was really meh for me. It truly is the best descriptor.
Boring and dull, I was bitter and annoyed the entire time I read.
I liked the idea of watching the girl fall to the cult through her boyfriend's view. The rape scene was, in my eyes, entirely unnecessary. Phoebe was already too deep in the cult for her to come back to reality so easily, it's framed that her sexual assault is what drives the nail in the coffin sealing her fate in the cult
She was already in the cult at that point, she would have just continued to be sucked in further. I find it frustrating that that scene is framed in such a manner.
I wasn't surprised to hear that R.O. Kwon spent 10 years working on this book, since it is polished to absolute perfection. In addition to its fantastic prose, The Incendiaries gives a different and uniquely dark treatment to the collegiate coming of age novel. Kwon expertly captures the tension between our need to connect and form communities, and the isolating tumult that self-discovery and self-definition can produce. The book reminded me of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, which I also loved, along with some of the elements of the film The Social Network. Although I read it in August, I think that The Incendiaries would make a fantastic winter read, and one could easily finish this little book on a single snow day.
Jesus Christ. I can't believe I actually finished this. My only remaining braincell is barely hanging on at this point.
Interesting themes and plot, boring and confusing execution. The writing is beautiful and very carefully done, if only the author had been that rigorous with all the other aspects of the book...
Not your typical campus novel. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl joins religious cult. This is a novel about faith, one protagonist grapples with having given up his faith, while the other flees to faith in order to make amends.
The language is poetic and experimental, sometimes I had to reread sentences making sure they were even proper sentences (verdict still out). Of the three perspectives Will's is the strongest, as we're really in his head. While the other two are Will's attempt at reconstructing their voices. John Leal's parts - even though they were short - felt superfluous to me, as they soon turned into religious ramblings disconnected from the narrative.
The introduction of college rape culture into the plot was poignant, as it was somewhat downplayed by us seeing it through Will's eyes. Even though the book makes interesting points about exploitation and radicalisation of believers, I think the offhand “nice guy” turn will stay in my mind a bit longer.
3.5 (rounded up)
I found myself just not really drawn into this one too much. I'm not sure if it's the fact that it was an audiobook or not, as I've had various degrees of success with them, but my mind wandered while listening.
It has some well written scenes and interesting themes, but just didn't hold my attention unfortunately.
I love how Will's faith, that once burned with a white hot fervour, is still something that he misses. The certainty that faith brings. Phoebe, still plagued by guilt and needing something bigger than herself to believe in, needs that faith. She's pulled between John Leal who is singular in his focus and promises to be there when she's ready to be something more, and Will who's still just trying to figure it out.
But the book is far more slippery than that and maybe I'm just reaching. The conflict between the certainties of faith and struggling when you no longer have that as a foundation to build on. And more obliquely the notion that religion needs to make demands to incite fervour, that simply espousing kindness hardly invokes devotion. It sees Will proselytizing at Fisherman's Wharf filled with the Holy Spirit and Phoebe standing on a rooftop as explosions level a building.
It's not like I'm saying if you practice the faith it's only a matter of time before you're blowing up a building. I'm struggling to clarify my ideas so I should cut Kwon some slack for being as slippery as she was. I can hardly expect answers, I just wished there was more I could grab on to.
PS I love the Asian-American author community that Kwon name-drops in the acknowledgements! I talk more about that and laissez-faire atheism here: https://youtu.be/bY7DE8UZk0M
I was really blown away by the depth of this novel. It's a short powerful story about a couple who meet while attending the same college. In the process of finding themselves and who they will become, Phoebe falls in with a cult and Will falls into a weird sort of worship of Phoebe. The Incendiaries has a lot to say about religion and faith, both the good and the bad.
Despite alternating narrators, it's really Will's story and because of that I truly did not understand the power the John Leal group had over Phoebe. I don't know if Phoebe understood it. I don't understand how it escalated to violence, and so quickly. John Leal's chapters did nothing for me and could have been omitted from the book.
Overall, there is a lot to think about with this one. It's beautifully written. The character of Will was so perfectly flawed and layered. Overall, it's about two broken people in a fragile time in their lives looking for something to believe in.
*note: listened to this on audio
Surprisingly momentum-driven, and gave me a lot of pause for thought. Not sure the casual reader will enjoy the format or diction, but “literary types” will love it.