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Fiction.
Literature.
Mystery.
HTML:From the best-selling author of While I Was Gone and The Senator’s Wife, a superb new novel about a family and a community tested when an arsonist begins setting fire to the homes of the summer people in a small New England town.
Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley has come home—home to the small New Hampshire village of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Then another house burns, and another, always the houses of the summer people. In a town where people have never bothered to lock their doors, social fault lines are opened, and neighbors begin to regard one another with suspicion. Against this backdrop of menace and fear, Frankie begins a passionate, unexpected affair with the editor of the local paper, a romance that progresses with exquisite tenderness and heat toward its own remarkable risks and revelations.
Suspenseful, sophisticated, rich in psychological nuance and emotional insight, The Arsonist is vintage Sue Miller—a finely wrought novel about belonging and community, about how and where one ought to live, about what it means to lead a fulfilling life. One of our most elegant and engrossing novelists at her inimitable best.… (more)
This was not my favourite Sue Miller but it kept me reading. I enjoyed the characters and especially liked Bud, he was a good guy. The themes this book covered were interesting: older parents, trying to figure your place in the world and the mystery identity of the arsonist. In the end nothing was really resolved which is almost painfully too like life. ( )
Later, Frankie would remember the car speeding past in the dark as she stood at the edge of the old dirt road.
Quotations
Her resistance seemed to her now the residue of some childish impulse that had stayed with her into adulthood, the impulse to keep her life from them, not to let them own it. —Frankie reflecting on her parents
It was paradise, she thought. The afternoon sun touched everything with gold, so that the grass, the fields, every tree, all seemed an invented green, not of this world naturally. Even the air seemed golden—the light itself was speckled and glittery where it was caught slantwise by dancing motes, by miniature insect life.
It could have been said, it probably was said among certain of her friends, that Frankie was leaving Africa because of a love affair—but that was only part of the truth.
She closed her eyes again and imagined the things he was looking at—the brilliant green of the Fenway grass, the muted powdery green of the walls, the figures in white and gray at their stations, almost motionless until the ball was hit and they responded, moving wildly in different directions but in balletic synchrony.
She had been surprised by her love for her grandchildren but, more than that, surprised by their love for her. She felt an almost absurd gratitude for it—for its sweet lack of complication, and for some sense of forgiveness she found in it, which she welcomed without really seeking to understand it.
The year was 1953. He was twenty-nine. She was twenty-two. They fell in love for all the usual reasons. They were both handsome and unattached.
More, she saw the wide-ranging quality of his many interests as, finally, self-absorption, a sort of armor against any deep human involvement.
She was bitter about all this, she knew that. Jealous in some way, she supposed—an easy, hateful emotion she struggled with. She tried not to let it creep into her daily life, into her interactions with all of them, but she could hear herself sometimes—impatient and demanding, occasionally contemptuous—and she felt a dislike for herself more intense than anything she sometimes felt for Alfie.
"It's always a mystery, isn't it?" Sylvia was looking out the window. She'd sat back away from the light, and her face was wistful, Frankie would have said. Almost beautiful.¶ Frankie was too surprised to speak for a moment. A gift, from her mother. An invitation. "What is?" she said.¶ "Oh, how anyone musters the will, or the courage, or the foolhardiness, to imagine a lasting thing. And then why that turns out so well for some people and so badly for others." She shrugged. Outside, the rain was suddenly heavier.
Now, much as she loved her daughters most of the time, they were really just people she knew. And it was not really them that she missed when they were gone, she thought suddenly. It was the children of her imagination, those small children who had so much belonged to her. Not the adults, with their work, with their busy lives.
That thing happened again, Frankie noted, wherein they were looking at each other with what seemed to her, anyway, a consciousness of finding the other attractive, of being found attractive. They were both smiling with the pleasant sense of it, the unspoken thing.
And even as she said it, even as his face shifted in sympathy, she knew she was announcing it to the town, that he would tell.
The toast popped up noisily. Sometimes it flung itself out so enthusiastically that it landed on the counter, and he always felt cheered when this happened.
She picked up the sandwich and took a bite, and Bud felt a pang, a yearning, for exactly this unremarkable domesticity.
No one had used the swing set for a long time. The chain on one side of one of the swings had broken, and the swing dangled vertically, moving a little every now and then in the breeze. It seemed to Frankie, suddenly, nearly tragic in its expression of desolation, of human loss.
Maybe the point was you said what you felt, you tried for what you wanted.
Her seatmate had gotten up a little bit earlier, and now he was halfway down the car, deep in conversation with a group of three men, one of whom was seated, looking up at the others. Their faces were animated. They were enjoying their catastrophe. Frankie had a sense, suddenly, familiar and yet new, of her aloneness. ¶ It had to do with the suspension she felt—in time, in place: the no-where-ness of being stuck here. The sense of others around her finding a way to be comfortable with it or else struggling hard against it. ¶ While to her it felt like a sad confirmation of sorts—You are nowhere, you belong nowhere. There is nowhere you're going, nowhere you're coming from.
The lesson was there were things you had to let go of, losses and mysteries you had to learn to live with.
And why not make Frankie, whose yearnings for all the unknowable things that lay behind those doors had seemed worthwhile and serious and noble to him, whose way of yearning seemed so real and affecting, even as it seemed to make their way forward together more unlikely, more vexed—why not let her be the emblem of everything other that he was giving up, if this helped him?
And why not resist? Why not resist anything final or definitive in life, anything that said After this, the doors will not stay open for you here, or here, or here.
Fiction.
Literature.
Mystery.
HTML:From the best-selling author of While I Was Gone and The Senator’s Wife, a superb new novel about a family and a community tested when an arsonist begins setting fire to the homes of the summer people in a small New England town.
Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for fifteen years, Frankie Rowley has come home—home to the small New Hampshire village of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Then another house burns, and another, always the houses of the summer people. In a town where people have never bothered to lock their doors, social fault lines are opened, and neighbors begin to regard one another with suspicion. Against this backdrop of menace and fear, Frankie begins a passionate, unexpected affair with the editor of the local paper, a romance that progresses with exquisite tenderness and heat toward its own remarkable risks and revelations.
Suspenseful, sophisticated, rich in psychological nuance and emotional insight, The Arsonist is vintage Sue Miller—a finely wrought novel about belonging and community, about how and where one ought to live, about what it means to lead a fulfilling life. One of our most elegant and engrossing novelists at her inimitable best.
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