September Bonus Book Review: American Fire
Monica Hesse's trim, flavorful whydunnit
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
“The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. …Accomack was desolate — there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.” So reads the inside flap of American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, and not long after that, the flap tells you that “Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic…upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson.” Which is both the end of the story, and a strange beginning to it.
The story
Announcing to your reader on page 11 — in the event she skipped reading the jacket copy, which longtime readers know I usually do — that Smith “had lit the fire. But nobody knew that yet, and they wouldn’t for a long time” is a pretty bold move in the genre, but the more I thought about it, the more it makes sense. For one thing, dragging out the reveal in the age of Google leads to static prose and failed attempts at narrative tension more often than not.
For another, Hesse’s book is as much about volunteer-firefighter “process,” and about life among the “Born Heres” of the “hangnail” that is the Eastern Shore of Virginia, as it is a string of dozens of fires in Accomack County that obliged many of the local firefighters to bunk at their houses on a semi-permanent basis. There’s history; there’s snapshots of small-town life; there’s Charlie himself, in recovery, often adrift, with his “hunched, folded way of walking” (36) and his ability to follow “precise directions” (39). There’s the psychology of arson and arsonists. There’s the difficulty of finding fresh ground in an ongoing story of this kind:
Reports of arsons were appearing almost daily on the local TV news as reporters strained their thesauruses looking for new words to describe fire, and ended up just saying “blazed” a lot. (59)
Hesse is a punchy writer, and I mean that in two ways: she has a way of two-line-sketching things just so (the reference to western states’ “big, cowboy counties” (62)), but also here and there a loopy quality to the prose — not in a bad way, but in a “do a belt of Old Overholt, set your phone timer for 33 minutes, and bang out this POV graf about Charlie’s motive, and if it comes out too ‘jazzy’ the editor will get it” way that I know intimately. Hesse’s tonal consistency and control are excellent, and the periodic switch-ups in pace from a Hemingway thing to a Kolker thing really work, as well as the alternating POVs from chapter to chapter. Perhaps more importantly, Hesse knows what she’s there to do — this is what happened, we know who did it, here’s why it’s of interest, thank you for your time — and she’s out in under 250 pages. It’s a quick read, mostly smooth (a couple of typos, and she thinks Errol Morris directed the Paradise Lost trilogy), no research showboating. And her take on the familiar-seeming, yet ultimately unknowable Tonya Bundick is compassionate — and nails in a couple of clauses why the Tonya Bundicks of the world tend to get compacted into cubes of trash in crime writing:
Maybe it was easier for people to like him than her, for the abstract ways it’s sometimes easier for people to wrap their heads around difficult men than complicated women. (194)
And then, once again, Hesse moves on, having done what she needed to.
I gave this one four stars on Goodreads, but it’s really a 4.5; it’s much harder than it looks to come to Broad Channel-type communities and convey in a balanced, un-condescending way what makes them different, but also the same. Hesse’s work in American Fire is a top-notch mix of thorough and engaged; this one’s definitely recommended. — SDB
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