Set in a very small area of New Hampshire, Sue Miller’s The Arsonist features as its protagonist Frankie Rowley, a burned-out aid worker just returned from Kenya. Her parents have been summer visitors to the area for years, since Frankie and her sister Liz were children. Now, the parents (Sylvia and Alfie) have retired permanently to their former summer home.
But: a fire starts in one of the unoccupied houses belonging to the summer visitors. A few days later, another fire in another such house. The fires increase in regularity, and some are set in occupied houses with families and children asleep. No one is hurt, luckily, but the tension in the community skyrockets. It seems likely that the arsonist is a permanent resident motivated by resentment against the well-to-do summer people.
Frankie is secretly sure she will never return to her work in Africa, but does not know what else she might do or where she will live. She is also shaken by the end of her relationship with a fellow aid worker who had a wife and children back in England. For the time being, she plans to spend the summer near her parents. There is a potential love interest — Bud, the owner of the local paper. Meanwhile, Frankie’s father Alfie starts showing startling signs of Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia: forgetting where he is and why, having hallucinations, restlessly insomniac.
Miller does a very nice job of delineating the characters, plunging you immediately into Frankie’s thoughts and backstory. Other characters are introduced carefully with plenty of time for you to understand their motivations and personalities. For the first half of the book, the tension is beautifully built up: who is the arsonist, and why is the motivation? how quickly will Alfie’s disease progress, and what will happen to him and Sylvia? What will Frankie decide about her life?
Miller’s style is detailed, to say the least. I enjoyed this most of the time, as it provided a visual image almost like a painting. Here’s Bud, the love interest, looking at Frankie:
Her hair was wet, in ringlets. She was wearing jeans and a big shirt, unbuttoned. It flapped open to reveal a black bathing suit. She carried a towel draped over one shoulder.
But the quotidian details can seem a bit unnecessary at times:
The toast popped up noisily. [..] He buttered it and sat down at the table, chewing contemplatively. He regarded this bread, from a bakery in Whitehall, flecked with seeds and grains and oats and flavored slightly with molasses, as one of the reasons for living where he did.
Miller non-judgementally examines the reactions of the permanent residents who run the shops and mow the lawns of the wealthier summer visitors. The town meeting with its tension between the two groups was particularly well done.
Loren [the police chief] went on. […]
“And here’s another thing. Lock up. “Annie Flowers stood up again. “But I have never i n my life locked my doors, Loren. Not once, all these years, all summer.”
Leonard Cott followed. “I hate to tell you, Loren, but we don’t even have a lock. We just padlock our doors when we leave in the fall, and then unpadlock them when we come back in June.” [..]
Summer people again, Bud thought. […]
The smile on Loren’s face had changed in its nature, its warm condescension losing all heat. He was silent a moment, looking around with a half smile. Then he said, “Maybe you all need to make the acquaintance of a locksmith.”
Someone called out, a woman’s voice “This is not why we come here.” There was something threatening in this tonally, inflectively, as if to say, If you can’t manage this better, we won’t come here anymore.
Then comes the denouement, which is oddly rushed. After detailed examinations of inner thoughts in the first half of the book, suddenly we have little insight into what makes the characters tick. Frankie is on a train to New York that runs late: after a couple of hours, she gets off and returns. But why? This seems oddly sudden and incompletely described. LIkewise, Sylvia and Alfie’s lives change, but then they drop completely out of sight for the last few chapters.
Real life is messy, complicated, and imperfect, it is true. But leaving so many loose threads at the end of the novel also leaves the reader unfulfilled, and surely we expect more from a book than from real life?
I have liked many of Sue Miller’s novels so I was thrilled your reviewed this one. Thank you for such an observant and fair review – as always!