***May contain spoilers for The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon. Read with caution.***
A young Korean woman is involved in a religious cult, and a young man is hopelessly in love with her—a troubling setup that makes for a very fascinating plot.
I didn’t get my hands on a copy of The Incendiaries until after an author event at Phoenix College where she spoke about her book. I hadn’t even read the blurb on the inside cover. I didn’t look it up on the internet, either. I wanted to hear what it was about directly from its author. When I did hear about it, I was not disappointed.
R. O. Kwon is such a sweet person. She is obviously smart, funny, and talented, and I am so grateful for having met her. When she arrived, she looked impeccably dressed in black and teal. I heard her read the first two chapters from The Incendiaries at Phoenix College (and again at Changing Hands Bookstore later that day), and I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to start reading her novel.
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I finally finished reading it. I remember reading the first two chapters and hearing, in my head, R. O. Kwon’s voice.
But this is where I start having trouble, Phoebe. Buildings fell. People died. You once told me I hadn’t even tried to understand. So, here I am, trying.
There were several things that stuck out to me while I began reading The Incendiaries. First of all, there are no quotations where dialogue is written. I think this is a bold choice and I have seen this type of style before. I think it makes the reader slow down when reading so as to pay closer attention to the context to better understand when the dialogue starts and stops. As someone who devours books one after another, as if in secret, as if I’m living inside Fahrenheit 451, I appreciate this type of style.
Secondly, I noticed how the chapters alternate between the three main characters: Phoebe Lin, Will Kendall, and John Leal. I am not a fan of this type of style in general. There was one series of books I read, The Wolves of Mercy Falls series by Maggie Stiefvater, that did this, however each chapter was in the first person point of view. I only read it because I love the author and am a dedicated fan of her books. Since then, though, I’ve refrained from reading books where each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view.
I can’t seem to find an author that writes in that style very well. I don’t know if it seems forced, too overwhelming, or something else entirely, but I’m just not a fan of it. I’ve even tried writing in that style myself, and I found that I couldn’t do it right, either. Whatever I wrote turned out to be complete garbage, even after I edited and revised over and over again. I’ve decided to stick with the third person point of view in my writing and reading endeavors. The only exception is Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, which is a novella told in the second person point of view. The Academy Award winning movie, Arrival, is based off of this story.
In The Incendiaries, however, it is mostly in the third person point of view. One thing that kind of threw me off at first was how, in Will’s and Phoebe’s chapters, they did occasionally speak in the first person. A lot of it, though, is written in the third person. I admit this was kind of confusing in the beginning, but the more I read, the easier it became to understand.
Probably the most significant thing I noticed while reading The Incendiaries was R. O. Kwon’s use of commas and gerunds. At first, I thought it was a little weird to have so much poeticism in a novel, phrases you might expect to see in a poem or prose piece, but as I read on, I found that it just worked. For some reason, it worked.
This is what I love about authors’ literary voices: sometimes they’re so goddamn unique and new that you fall in love with them when you read just one piece of their writing for the first time. When I read a Stephen King novel, I just know, Okay, this is definitely King. When I read something by Maggie Stiefvater, I just know, This is so Maggie. And now when I read R. O. Kwon, I’ll know: her distinct literary voice is truly unlike anyone else’s I’ve ever read. Reading The Incendiaries was not just reading for me. It was an experience, a privilege, to read her work.
The Incendiaries is as radiant as it is dark. It is a love story of extremes. It is not a fall from grace, but a forceful snatching from morality. Phoebe Lin is a party girl. She drinks and dances and loves her boyfriend Will but soon even those first-year college delicacies don’t match the lustful intrigue of John Leal and the Jejah cult.
The Incendiaries is as radiant as it is dark. It is not a fall from grace, but a forceful snatching from morality.
Phoebe is swept off her feet by this cult and Will is left stranded in their shared apartment, wondering what he did wrong or maybe if he just wasn’t enough – something that I often wonder about my own love life. It turns out that, in the end, Will couldn’t compare to the thrill and promise of Jejah.
As you read on, you learn more about Phoebe’s past as a piano prodigy, about her parents and their divorce, her mother’s tragic death and Phoebes subsequent guilt; Will’s parents and his mother’s illness, his own obsession with the faith and then the loss of it; John Leal’s past overseas, his life as a cult leader disguised as an eccentric kind of missionary, his forceful pull of the innocent. This novel is chock-full of power dynamics: John Leal has power over Phoebe, Phoebe has power over Will. And Will? I’m not sure Will has any power over anyone else save for himself. And even then, maybe not even himself. His love proves to be too forceful – figuratively and literally – and that is eventually what drives Phoebe away for good.
This novel is a love story, yes, a love story between a young man, a young woman, and a young woman’s belief in a higher purpose that proves to be anything but holy. At the end of the novel, it is Will and the reader, I think, who are left with the most questions, and I’m okay with that. I like to imagine, and I like to think that a certain someone is still alive. Or maybe another certain someone has to learn to live their life knowing the person they loved is gone. There are so many possibilities and it’s fun to try and imagine the many scenarios that this story could have after the last page.
I can’t imagine it’s easy trying to wrap up a novel without answering all questions or none at all. You want to leave something to the reader’s imagination, right? As authors, we can’t hand-feed our audiences. We have to let them imagine, too. That’s the fun of writing fiction, I think. To give readers most of a story but let them figure out the rest. It’s very much like a mother bird pushing their babies off a branch to make them learn how to fly. Or something less cliché like that.
It also certainly doesn’t hurt to have Asian representation in a novel. I’ve only read three novels (one trilogy) with a female Asian lead before, and that was Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, the first of which is now a major motion picture and the #1 rom-com of the decade. I know I’m not Korean or Chinese; I’m Japanese. Still, seeing Asian female leads in novels like The Incendiaries (and films and TV shows and YouTube series) gives me an insurmountable sense of pride. We exist. We write. We create. We love and grieve and lose and win and we have always done so. We have always been here. We’ve just never had as many opportunities to showcase our talents. R. O. Kwon’s success gives me hope as an aspiring Asian-American writer.
I know rushing art is never a good idea; rushing creativity is like trying to push out a fart: it’ll just end up being shit. Still, I do hope R. O. Kwon doesn’t take another ten years to write her next novel. But even if she does, I’m sure it’ll be nothing short of spectacular.
The Incendiaries is a fiction novel by R. O. Kwon. Find out more about her and her novel here.
Wayward Musings 