When Kwon digs deep into a subject, she has ample skill to bring it to life.

Phoebe’s back story of emigrating from South Korea with her mother, on the run from an abusive father, is intriguing and vividly depicted. Deprived of rations, a man had eaten the shit-soiled rags used to wipe latrines.' A five-year-old child hanged for stealing a little rice. Cult leader Leal paints a harrowing picture of life in a North Korean gulag: 'Lives thrown out like trash, he said. Will, who can't believe his luck with his new girlfriend, regards Phoebe 'in the old-gold light of morning, I had the idea she might have been a wild sea-creature who'd washed onshore, luck's gift, legs tucked like a mermaid's tail'. This is no doubt about Kwon's prose, which is at times beautiful and eloquent and worthy of attention. The blurbs for The Incendiaries include praise from writers like Jenny Offill, Lauren Groff and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thang Nguyen.

This may seem like a plot spoiler but in a novel with little tension and poor pacing, this supposed main event has little build or resonance. The cult, Jejah, ends up responsible for a terrorist attack in later proceedings. Blaming herself, Phoebe gets drawn into a cult run by former Edwards student John Leal. The focus of Will’s fictions is Phoebe, a Korean-American virtuoso pianist who has given up playing following the death of her mother. In alarmingly similar fashion to Tartt’s Richard Papen, Will has left small-town California for an east coast college, where he aims to impress by rewriting history: “My mother’s house sailed south from dull, meth-addled Carmenita to the hills of Los Angeles.” It could be grief’s narrowed vision: I’ve noticed what I’ve lacked,” says Will Kendall, the book’s problematic narrator who relates events at Edwards University in the fictional town of Noxhurst. “It’s possible these are just the details I’ve saved. Mystery that involves much second guessing and questioning of memory. Working class narrator who invents a preppy persona to hide his roots? Check.

The stylish writing and interesting subject matter are lost in a plodding narrative that feels like a paint-by-numbers attempt at Donna Tartt's The Secret History. An elite American college, two outsiders in a love-at-first-sight relationship, a former student turned cult leader, a plot involving extremist terrorism and a damaged, grieving narrator who looks back on it all, trying to understand what went wrong.īut despite promising a tale of obsession, fanaticism and loss, RO Kwon's debut The Incendiaries fails to ignite. The raw materials are there for an explosive novel.

The incendiaries ro kwon