Book Review of The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon 9/29/2018 11:57:51 AM
An Explosive Debut by a Talented Young Writer The Incendiaries
By R.O. Kwon
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Books; 1st Edition (July 31, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780735213890
ISBN-13: 978-0735213890
ASIN: 0735213895
On November 18, 1978, 918 members of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Jonestown, Guyana, were found dead—either by mass suicide or mass murder as some have argued; on April 19, 1993, 76 members of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas perished after a siege on its compound by federal agents resulted in a catastrophic fire; and on March 26, 1997, 39 members of the religious group, Heaven’s Gate, were found dead, the result of another mass suicide. What all three groups had in common was a charismatic and manipulative leader who convinced his members he was a vessel by which the divine imparted secret wisdom only through him. While this concept is by no means new—in the New Testament, Christ tells his followers the only way to the Father (God) is through him—in the aftermath of such tragedies, the public is left with a singular question: how could otherwise seemingly rational and intelligent human beings in our increasingly modern world, fall for such an obvious charlatan? In R.O. Kwon’s novel, The Incendiaries, the reader is introduced to John Leal, an Asian-American survivor of a North Korean gulag who seems an amalgam of history’s most infamous cult leaders, one with a credible and compelling mythos who offers his followers his own ascetic path to salvation.
Our protagonist, and entry point into the story, is Will Kendell, a working-class student at an Upstate New York, elite college named Edwards, where the cult leader Leal once attended and whom has now returned to lead his small religious sect, Jejah. Will has recently shed his Fundamentalist Christian upbringing in favor of an uneasy atheism, and instead of reveling in the new-found liberation, he quietly mourns the loss of the structure religious life provided, as well as the feelings of euphoria that giving oneself over to a higher power instills in the human brain. He fills this gaping hole in his life with an almost-obsessive love for Phoebe Haejin Lin—an outgoing Korean student at Edwards whom, like Will, is a fellow transplant from California. Through much of the first half of the novel, Kwon charts the developing relationship between the couple, and the reader learns that Phoebe comes with her own emotional baggage; she was once a musical prodigy until, having discovered the limits of her own abilities, realizes she will never play like the Masters. Perhaps even more compelling, Phoebe’s mother perished in an automobile accident when she was a teen, and she still shoulders the guilt of her untimely death.
The characters of Will and Phoebe mirror each other in many ways, and complement each other in others. Both are children of divorce; however, where Will was once devout, Phoebe lays claim to no religious upbringing. While it would seem obvious that the spiritually-lost Will would be the most vulnerable to the radical proselytizing of Leal, it is instead Phoebe, whom has never known the seductive pull of the divine, that becomes not only a follower of Leal, but his most-trusted disciple. Of course, Leal is not all that he seems, and Will sets out to expose him to Phoebe in the hopes of reclaiming her for himself. The novel builds to a feverish climax where the true meaning of the book’s title becomes terrifyingly clear.
Kwon is a gifted writer whose prose is at once spare and complex. Her minimalist style and deceptively intricate sentences reveal only the bare minimum; her unorthodox cadence requires the reader to consider each word carefully—to often reread entire passages—until the meaning of her words reveal themselves like tragic koans. From the beauty of her prose emerge horrific images of Leal’s nightmarish time in the gulag and of the twisted metal of the car crash that claimed Phoebe’s mother’s life. The chapters alternate between Will’s first-person account, and epistolary segments from Phoebe’s journal which often offer a he/she alternative to Will’s narrative, as well to provide fleeting glimpses into the apocalyptic teachings of Leal. As timeless as it is timely, Kwon introduces late into the story, an unflinching and realistic episode that offers up the book’s own #MeToo moment.
The Incendiaries is a compelling and taut novel, a satisfying marriage of the styles of Cormac McCarthy and Donna Tartt. It is a dazzling debut by a talented author and I look forward to reading more of her work in the future.
