Contemporary Authors

• The Incendiaries ( novel) Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. The incendiaries LCCN 2018288296 Type of material Book Personal name Kwon, R. O., author. Main title The incendiaries / R.O. Kwon. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2018. ©2018 Description 214 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780735213890 (hardback) 0735213895 (hardback) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• R. O. Kwon - https://ro-kwon.com/about/

  R.O. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, is published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Virago (U.K.), and will be released by Einaudi (Italy) and Agora (Poland). She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Electric Literature, Playboy, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Born in South Korea, she’s mostly lived in the United States.

• The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/a-writers-fixation-on-sound/565904/

  CULTURE
  A Writer’s Fixation on Sound
  The author R. O. Kwon reflects on the relationship of rhythm to writing and how she stopped obsessing over the first 20 pages of her new novel, The Incendiaries.

  JOE FASSLER
  JUL 24, 2018
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  Doug McLean
  It’s not that it was easy for R. O. Kwon to write The Incendiaries, her debut novel. The book took 10 years to finish, and along the way she faced many of the challenges first-time authors do: self-doubt, creative failure, awkward questions from friends and family about her progress. But, in a conversation for this series, Kwon explained that she was able to weather the struggles of her book’s prolonged development by focusing on the simple, profound joys of working with language—an essential pleasure she feels is perhaps best expressed in a letter by Edith Wharton.

  Kwon’s obsession with rhythm and sound shows on every page of The Incendiaries, a book written in short sections that glimmer with the sharpness and density of finely wrought gems. But this hyper-attentiveness to language has not always been an asset, and it took a timely lesson from the writer Lauren Groff for Kwon to learn when to loosen up, and when to fixate on each syllable. We discussed how language itself can be a distraction from everyday anxieties, why she records herself reading her work out loud, and how she knew it was time to stop changing the words and admit the book was finished.

  The Incendiaries begins with an explosion, a building destroyed by a bomb while onlookers watch from an 11th-story rooftop. The story that follows is told in brief flashes that alternate points of view, sections short and razor sharp as flying shards. Phoebe is a troubled young woman falling under the influence of John Leal, a charismatic and bloody-minded cult leader with a shadowy past. And Will is Phoebe’s adoring classmate, left picking up the pieces as he tries to understand how the woman he loved fell under John Leal’s spell. Taken together, Kwon’s multifaceted narrative portrays America’s dark, radical strain, exploring the lure of fundamentalism, our ability to be manipulated, and what can happen when we’re willing to do anything for a cause.

  MORE IN THIS SERIES
  By Heart
  Authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
  The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life
  JOE FASSLER
  The Powerful Practice of Writing by Hand
  JOE FASSLER
  What J.D. Salinger Understood About Chance Encounters
  JOE FASSLER
  R. O. Kwon is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in literature. Her writing has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, Vice, and BuzzFeed. She spoke to me by phone.

  R. O. Kwon: Usually when I truly love a writer, and I’ve worked through all their fiction or poetry or essays or whatever it is, I’ll turn toward their letters and journals. That’s how I found a line from one of Edith Wharton’s letters, something that stuck with me throughout the long process of completing my novel. I can’t remember when it was exactly—I just know I needed to write it down.

  I keep a giant, running document of bits and pieces from books I love. I’ve found that document to be helpful when I’m stuck, and sometimes I just turn to it for pleasure, really. If I read something online that I want to keep, I’ll paste it in. When I’m reading a book, I’ll write down all the page numbers in the back with lines I’ve underlined, short passages I want to keep for myself. When I finish the book, I’ll go through it again and copy into my document the lines or phrases I think I might later want or need.

  For years, this line from Wharton has stayed up near the top of this giant repository, where I keep my go-tos:

  “I don’t believe that there is any greater blessing than that of being pierced through & through by the splendour or sweetness of words, & no one who is not transfixed by ‘Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise,’ or ‘thick as Autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,’ has known half the joy of living. Don’t you agree with me?—I wouldn’t take a kingdom for it.”

  Here Wharton revels in the sheer joy of words. I love that there’s a sentence of untranslated German, a line from Goethe. Since it’s a language I don’t speak, for me it puts the musicality of language above all else. In my own work, if the music isn’t coming together—if the sounds aren’t coming together in a given sentence—then I know I’m doing something wrong. Sound is paramount for me when I’m writing.

  The first poem I really fell in love with as a kid was “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” by Keats, which I know isn’t terribly original, as first loves go. But it’s so good. I remember reading it on the page, and my attitude was just, “Okay, whatever, it’s another poem.” I didn’t get it. But then, for some reason, I decided to read it out loud to myself—and I was amazed by what the sounds were doing. That was how I fell in love with poetry, and it’s a feeling that has never left me.

  The sound of words often hits faster than sense. I read once that T. S. Eliot sometimes heard what a line should sound like before the words came to him, a rhythm he would feel and fit words into. I know he’s far from the only poet who’s said that, and, of course, the same thing can happen with prose. When it does, it’s amazing because then it feels like I truly know what I am doing—which, otherwise, is a pretty rare experience.

  This feeling can help remind me why I love to write, and why I love to read. Writing can be a long, difficult process. I worked for 10 years on my first book. Part of what kept me going was just reminding myself of what I love most about writing in the first place: hanging out in the syllables. If I’m there, there isn’t space for discouragement, there isn’t space for being miserable. Because I’m just focused on the words and not on my own state of mind, whatever that might be.

  I do feel lucky to have this thing that gives me so much joy, that I find so utterly fascinating. I’m sure painters, for instance, feel lucky, too—lucky to love color the way they do, or the texture of paint. For me, it’s the feeling of words in my mouth. Words are sound, after all, which makes writing such a physical, bodily experience. Like Wharton says, “I wouldn’t take a kingdom for it.”

  I couldn’t feel done with my novel until I could pick it up, read a line, and not desperately want to change all the words. That process took so much time. So many rounds, so many rewrites. I have no idea how many revisions—and I don’t want to know, because I don’t want to know how many the next book is going to take. I imagine it might take just as many.

  As I was writing, I struggled with how long my process was taking, especially when friends and family kept asking about my progress. I remember, especially around year seven and year eight, how people would politely ask, “Oh, how’s it going?” with trepidation in their loving eyes. I started wishing I could wear a T-shirt to the family Thanksgiving that said let’s talk about anything but my novel.

  It did help, throughout, that I was writing short pieces—short fiction, short nonfiction, things I published here and there. I applied to a lot of things. I was always applying for fellowships and scholarships and grants. Those mini jolts of encouragement would help.

  And yet external affirmation—in whatever form, whether it’s a fellowship or publication—really has nothing to do with the self that loves to write. The self that fell in love with reading, and eventually in love with writing, too. Sometimes, as I work, I truly forget I have an “I”—it’s a place that’s as close to religion as I get. That self is totally uninterested in external affirmation. Of course, I eventually have to leave my desk, and the day goes on, and that egoless state is gone. But when I’m there, it can all feel so easy, and so right. I wish I could stay there.

  Part of writing The Incendiaries was learning to put aside that fixation on sound, at least temporarily. During the first two years, I had this idea that the sentences needed to be perfect before I could proceed. So I spent two whole years just reworking the first 20 pages over and over again. By the end, I had the most reworked, totally inert pages I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just going nowhere. I was obsessing over the first 20 pages, and doing almost nothing to develop my own sense of the story. Not long after that, I met Lauren Groff at a writers’ conference, and she talked about how she approaches the first few drafts—how she gets through them fast and throws them away. She writes by hand, at first. The idea is to get through early drafts as quickly as possible. When I heard that, something just clicked for me.

  After the conference, I started trying my own version of her method. I wrote whole drafts by hand. Then I wrote using a program that acts just like a typewriter: You can backspace once, but can’t cut and paste full paragraphs, and can only move forward. Then, in Word, I wrote a draft in which, every time I finished a paragraph, I turned the font white so I couldn’t see it and mess with it anymore.

  I realized that I can spend all day finessing the sound of a single paragraph—but if it’s an early draft, the chances are that the paragraph isn’t going to stick around anyway. So first I need to get to a place where I feel that the story is working, where the basic architecture is at least partly there. There’s no reason to do all that careful line-edit work when I’m still making basic character and structural changes.

  It does mean that the first few drafts aren’t much fun to write, since I’m not spending time on the part of writing where I find the most joy. But that provides additional motivation for me to get through them even more quickly, and that can be a good thing in the beginning.

  As I continue, and start to focus more on sound, on the sentences, one technique I use is to figure out where I’m getting bored. When I’m finding joy in a paragraph, there’s really no sentence where I’m getting bored. If I am getting bored, I have to look back and try to figure out on a word level how to make those sentences less boring. It’s not just about the thought that’s being expressed. It’s also about what the words are doing with one another and how they’re playing together.

  In pretty much any fiction I write, I do a lot of reading out loud to help me determine whether the sound is working. Toward the end of this novel, I tried something new: I recorded myself reading the book a number of times and listened to it. I found that to be incredibly helpful—if often painful—because who wants to listen to their own voice reading their own book for hours on end? It was surreal. But it also let me catch a lot of things that I couldn’t catch just by looking at the page, or even by reading out loud to myself. I really recommend it. I know some writers who use a computer program that will read the file out loud instead. A friend of mine will even give the voice an accent, just to make the words that much more unfamiliar.

  Through it all, there were also the books I loved, the favorite lines that remind me of what Wharton calls the “splendor & sweetness of words.” Without the reading, there is no writing. I keep by my desk the books that I found I returned to most often while writing this book. There were a few years when I would always start the writing day by reading a single Virginia Woolf novel. I don’t want to name the book, because I’m afraid if I do it will lose its power. But I began every day by reading a passage, maybe a page, and that was it. It helped me set the tone of the day, and helped pull me back into my own novel. There were others, but that’s the most extreme example of how another writer helped me write my book.

  And then there was my Word document, the one where I keep all my favorite and most helpful lines. When I feel confused and lost, if I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m going to do next, and when it feels like I’ll probably never finish a piece of fiction again, I just go back to the document and start reading. Almost inevitably, something changes. I think there’s never been a time when that hasn’t sparked something in me, and given me an idea or a thought that can bring me back to my own writing—back to the pure fascination with sound where I love to live.

  We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

• Chicago Review of Books - https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/07/31/the-incendiaries-r-o-kwon-interview/

  INTERVIEWS
  R.O. Kwon Doesn’t Trust Garamond, And Neither Should You

  BY ARAM MRJOIAN
  JULY 31, 2018
  COMMENTS 0

  R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries is the rare debut novel that excels on every level. The writing is superb, the story is brilliant, and the mechanical elements blend with the larger structure to create a work that is cohesive, exhilarating, and impressive. I don’t use the first person much when writing about books, but to make a quick exception—I love this book and you should read it.

  Set primarily at the fictitious Edwards University, The Incendiaries follows the romance between undergrads Will Kendall, a former Christian fundamentalist, and Phoebe Lin, a Korean-American party girl who once hoped to “be a piano genius” and left Seoul with her mother at a young age. Coming to college after a horrific car accident that killed her mom, Phoebe still feels immense guilt, having been behind the wheel. Over time, the couple is sucked into a radical cult led by John Leal. Phoebe, uncharacteristically, appears to be a true believer, whereas Will plays along in hopes of holding onto his crumbling relationship.

  Will’s point of view is most prominent throughout the novel and he often has to fill in gaps in the story using his knowledge of Phoebe and John. This results in Will providing more access to other characters than would be possible without conjecture. Furthermore, Will’s deep and ongoing obsession with Phoebe is revealed. Through Will, we learn about the personal baggage and complex, morphing ideologies that tie the three together.

  I spoke with R.O. Kwon over the phone. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

  Aram Mrjoian

  There are so many places we could begin! But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about process. I noticed in the acknowledgements you had done some residencies while working on this project and was interested in what it was like to bring your first novel to full fruition.

  R.O. Kwon

  Well, the novel took 10 years. I’ve been working on it since grad school. In the first two years, I spent the entire time reworking the first 20 pages over and over again, because I loved sentences. I loved the words at the syllable level and I wanted to get those pages as perfect as they could be before I moved along.

  In retrospect, it was kind of a nutty way to go about it, because I barely knew who the characters were or what the story of the book would be. I didn’t know what the structure was so I couldn’t tell any of it. So on a friend’s advice—Lauren Groff’s advice—I ended up changing my method entirely and I started whipping through early drafts without worrying about the prose. I worked in longhand or used a program to turn my laptop into a typewriter so that I could only do one backspace at a time and couldn’t copy and paste. At one point, I was turning the font white with each new paragraph as I moved along so that I couldn’t see what came before it. I was doing all kind of things to subvert my own inclination to obsess over the words.

  Aram Mrjoian

  I’ve never heard of turning the text white and I’m definitely going to steal that. I imagine 10 years feels like a long time to commit to a project, but what has happened in that time you didn’t expect? Does it feel weird that the novel is here now?

  R.O Kwon

  Well it was so private for so long. It felt like a private dream that I was having and cared so much about. I’m still getting used to the reality that other people are reading it. Interviewers or friends will be asking me about the book and internally I’ll wonder “how do you know about that?” Then I remember “oh right I wrote this thing and it’s getting published.”

  I’ve been working for two years already on my second novel. It’s been sort of going in starts and stops, because any time I have work to do on my first novel I drop it and go back to it. Having spent so long on my first novel, I’m still sort of wrapped up in that world, and I think I still haven’t quite figured out how to move on from that.

  Aram Mrjoian

  With the idea of dropping everything when necessary for the first novel, what has the revision and editing process been like? One thing I truly adore about this book is that you can see the attention to detail at the sentence level. It’s not a surprise to me that you talked about those first 20 pages because the prose is gorgeous. You can see the precision on every page. Was it difficult bringing editors into the mix as the novel moved toward publication?

  R.O. Kwon

  The book sold to my editor at Riverhead in March 2016 and we weren’t done with edits between the two of us until last summer. Then there were still copyedits for some time after that. So we did about 15 months of major editing. I love my editor. I have no idea what people are talking about when they say no one in publishing edits anymore, because her attention to detail was as intense as my own. We had these wonderful back-and-forths about punctuation. Getting to work with someone who cared that much made the book so much better.

  Aram Mrjoian

  Perhaps a follow-up question, and I don’t mean to put you on the spot here, but I do follow you on Twitter, and I saw one of your tweets challenging the old adage of killing your darlings. I don’t have the tweet in front of me, but the idea I got out of it was generally that all your sentences are your darlings and you can make them better. I’m interested in your personal ideas about revision and what strategies you use when working on the sentence level.

  R.O. Kwon

  For one thing, I care so much about sound. It was really helpful for me, especially in later drafts, to record myself reading the book and then play it back as I read, which distanced me from the prose a little bit. I also change font sizes. I write in 10-point font. I know there are some hardcore Times New Roman haters, but I appreciate that it’s a little bit ugly. Garamond is way too pretty and it hides flaws.

  Aram Mrjoian

  Garamond tricks you into thinking what you’ve written is good.

  R.O. Kwon

  Yeah, exactly! When I write in Garamond it makes me think “wow that’s a really elegant sentence,” but in Times New Roman I look at it and realize “No, there’s nothing going on here.” I like the plainness of Times New Roman. I know some people write in Courier New, but that’s too messy for me.

  As I’m revising, I’ll switch the font to 12-point because the things that are wrong, the errors, jump out more at me. I also care—and I try not to talk about this too much because people sometimes think it’s weird, but I think poets understand—about how the letters look on the page. That matters a lot to me too.

  Aram Mrjoian

  I’m also curious about structure and how point of view function in this novel. I felt like at the beginning of some of the chapters it kind of tricks us a little bit with reported dialogue, especially in Phoebe’s chapters. Can you tell me about how you brought these characters to life and how you found the points of view? Are you purposefully manipulating point of view a little bit?

  R.O. Kwon

  The first two years the book was entirely told by Phoebe, but when I threw away everything and restarted I realized it was hard to stay in the head of someone who was going through so much for the length of the book. I found when I started telling the story through someone close to her, in this case Will, it gave me distance and space to do more. I thought about The Great Gatsby and what the novel would be if it were told from Jay Gatsby’s point of view instead of Nick Carraway, who’s so much less involved in the heart of the story. For several years, it was only told from Will’s point of view, but when I sent it to my agent, one of her biggest pieces of feedback was to ask for more of Phoebe’s point of view. I had a lot of Phoebe written that wasn’t in that draft of the book so I added some of her back in. Then I realized I could add some of John Leal’s point of view and that would add other insights. I structured it that way because—even though I was telling it from three different people—I wanted the book to have a reason for existing that makes sense within the world of the book. In a lot of ways, the book comes about as a result of Will trying to understand what happened. He tells the story in a way he can make sense of everything. Having him as the overall narrator and having him pull in these other points of view keeps it an organic piece of fiction for me.

  Aram Mrjoian

  With Will trying to make sense of Phoebe ending up in a cult, I thought some about the general disposition toward believing we can’t be manipulated that way. There are nuances of this novel where we see Phoebe change and we see Will change. I’m wondering what kind of research you had to do on cults and how you made it believable that Phoebe would join up with a terrorist organization, even if it’s not in her best interest.

  R.O. Kwon

  There was a period of time where I read every nonfiction book I could find about cults and about cult life, but after that I tried to forget pretty much everything I learned, because I really want the cult in the book to be its own and for John Leal to be a leader with his own obsessions. I was also drawing on my own experiences with religion. I grew up deeply religious and there was a time in early high school when I became even more religious. You know, my idea of a really fun Friday night was a youth rally in a church. I was part of a youth group that became so all consuming all of our parents were worried that it might have been a cult. It really wasn’t, but I do strongly remember how absorbing it was to be that wrapped up close in a group of people. During the earlier parts of working through the cult-like aspects of the book, I also visited a church in Berkeley a few times that’s been accused of being a cult.

  Aram Mrjoian

  Where do you think our interest in cults comes from and how does religion sometimes get wrapped up in cult mentality?

  R.O. Kwon

  I hesitate to generalize, because I can only draw on my own experience. Something cults often peddle is certainty. They offer clean, broad answers to questions people tend to have and they can be extra appealing during times of uncertainty. I’m not sure exactly where the lines between cults and religions are, but in the novel I was interested in exploring them.

  Aram Mrjoian

  Maybe on a less serious note, to end with a question I ask authors all the time, because they’re often on the pulse of what’s going on in the lit world. What are you reading right now and what are you excited to read in the near future?

  R.O. Kwon

  I’ll talk about what I’m looking forward to in the fall. There are two books coming out, one by Nicole Chung and one by Lydia Kiesling. They’re both really wonderful. I believe Lydia’s comes out in September and Nicole’s in October. There’s also a graphic novel by Ancco coming out from Drawn & Quarterly called Bad Friends and I was just really excited to read it. I finished it in one go. Kiese Laymon has a new memoir, Heavy, coming out in October. I haven’t read it yet but I heard him read from part of it at a conference in Louisiana and I’m really excited about it.

  9780735213890_bb8ca

  FICTION
  The Incendiaries
  By R.O. Kwon
  Riverhead Books
  Published July 31, 2018

  R. O. Kwon is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her writing is published or forthcoming in The Guardian, Vice, Buzzfeed, Time, Noon, Electric Literature, Playboy, and elsewhere. She has received awards from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Omi International, the Steinbeck Center, and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony. Born in South Korea, she has lived most of her life in the United States.

• Signature - https://www.signature-reads.com/2018/07/making-fictional-cult-interview-author-r-o-kwon/

  INTERVIEWS
  The Making of a Fictional Cult: An Interview with Author R. O. Kwon
  By AMY BRINKER
  July 30, 2018

  SHARE
  R. O. Kwon © Smeeta Mahanti

  R. O. Kwon’s debut novel is a slim sucker punch of a book — over ten years in the making, it explores faith, cults, and apostasy. In the first few pages, we get a glimpse of an act of horrible violence, the culmination of a young woman named Phoebe’s path to fanaticism. Will, her boyfriend, is reeling from the news and tries to make sense of things by piecing together the story of their relationship. We chatted about the unique loneliness that comes from loss of faith, restarting and rejiggering book structure, and why Kwon spoils TV shows for herself.
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  The Incendiaries
  by R. O. Kwon

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  SIGNATURE: The Incendiaries is short and very tightly-packed and restrained — when you write, do you edit down considerably? Or do you naturally tend to write economically and just rework sentences?

  R. O. KWON: So I worked on the book for ten years and it went through so many drafts — easily more than thirty. But I don’t want to know how many drafts it took me, because the less I know the more I can really throw myself into my next novel that I’m working on. I spent the first two years just rewriting the first twenty pages over and over again and threw that all away and restarted everything. There’s a whole section told from Phoebe’s father’s point of view that I ended up throwing out. So I’m the opposite of an economical writer!

  SIG: But it works for you! You found your way! The points of view in the book have changed a ton, but were there any other massive shifts?

  ROK: For the first two years it was all told from Phoebe’s point of view, and for a variety of reasons I started telling it just from Will’s point of view, and then in year six I started adding in Phoebe’s point of view and then John Leal’s point of view. It has changed dramatically in terms of scope and who’s getting to talk.

  SIG: I think a lot of people would like to think they’re not prone to fanaticism or that they wouldn’t be taken into a cult — that it wouldn’t happen to us. This book, terrifyingly, shows how it can happen. Phoebe’s slow assimilation into the cult is not because she’s naïve or ignorant at all — would you explain some of the draw of John Leal?"I have so many ways in which I contort my life to be able to write."
  TWEET THIS QUOTE

  ROK: John Leal as a person and as a cult leader offers certainty; he offers answers to questions that are often unanswerable. And I think that can be tremendously appealing, especially to people who are hurting. When I was researching cults and terrorist groups, extremist groups, I learned that a lot of them do recruit at high schools and colleges, I think in part because that is a time of change. People are figuring out who they are and they’re often away from their usual support systems and where they grew up. I learned that a lot of people who join extremist groups (contrary to the general perception) are educated and have experienced quite a bit of privilege — it isn’t necessarily born out of ignorance or naivety.

  I read so much about so many different cults, but at a certain point I tried to forget everything I read, because I wanted this to be its own cult; I wanted this to be John Leal’s cult informed by its own obsessions.

  SIG: So much of this book centers around the unbelievable pain that follows a loss of faith. It seems like such a private, intimate subject to write about. Is this something you felt wasn’t represented in books or other media? Do you feel protective of this experience?

  ROK: I don’t feel protective of it exactly, but it was so important to me that those parts be as truthful as they could possibly be to what I personally experienced. I was so religious for a period of time — all my life until I was 17 — and when I was losing my faith, it was so painful. At the time I felt so lonely and I didn’t see that experience reflected in the books I loved, where I was otherwise so used to finding camaraderie and companionship. So I really wanted to write something that I could have given to myself when I was seventeen and felt alone in the world. Since then I’ve come across other accounts too, but I still think there aren’t that many accounts of apostasy — I wanted to provide that to the girl I used to be. I wanted to invoke the joy of it too — in some ways, when I was really religious I was so happy.

  SIG: We read the perspectives of three characters and no one is omniscient — there’s plenty of uncertainty and incomplete knowledge — why is that ambiguity so important to this novel?

  ROK: I really didn’t impose it from top-down, it came about over time — as these point of views started being added in, I wanted the book to have a reason for existing even within the world of the book itself. In a lot of ways the book feels to me like Will is trying to make sense of it, trying to tell himself the story of what happened. I didn’t want to exceed the limits of what Will could know, which is relatively incomplete. So that provided a kind of limit to how many answers I could provide.

  SIG: You create a parameter for yourself too by beginning the book with the act of climatic violence. Why did you choose to lead with the bombing and unspool the plot from there?

  ROK: Those first few pages came relatively clearly to me and those have stayed the same throughout the life of the book in a way that almost nothing else did. I wanted to lead with the big explosion because in general with writing and in my reading, I’m so much less interested in what happened as in how and why. So I almost wanted to provide the big “what happened” at the start, so that the destruction can be out of the way. Even when I was watching, say, “Friday Night Lights,” the plot would stress me out so much that I’d read ahead on Wikipedia to find out what’s going to happen to these poor kids! I find the way plot yanks one along to be often extremely unpleasant, so I don’t want to write a book that relies so heavily on that mechanic.

  SIG: One of my friends can’t handle horror movies, so he just reads the summaries online to get the same thrills!

  ROK: I haven’t been able to watch horror movies basically since I stopped believing in God! I used to love horror movies and then the world got so much scarier without an omniscient being looking over everything and making sure everything would be okay. As you know, I truly used to believe I was immortal! Serial killers don’t seem so scary if you think you’re going to live forever.

  SIG: I’ve read that you love writing residencies — are there any tips or habits you’ve adopted that you can share?

  ROK: I have so many ways in which I contort my life to be able to write. I’m really nocturnal so I wake up around noon or so and go to sleep around six or seven AM. If I am writing that day (which until the past few months was every day) I like to roll out of bed, get coffee, get some water, and start writing immediately. I sort of step from my dream world into this other dream world — I find that that makes me less afraid of starting to write. There’s always this fear when I start writing, so if I’m sleepy and haven’t encountered the world yet, it’s just easier to just get to it. I don’t have a smartphone and I usually use a program that shuts off the internet. It’s important for me to be as off the internet as possible. I won’t talk to anyone either — even if my husband’s home — it’s like, ok no talking until I’ve gotten in a few hours. At writing residencies, they make it so there’s nothing for you to do, they even make your coffee for you, so there’s no excuse for you not to write. I love residencies so much!

• Hyphen - https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2018/06/interview-ro-kwon-author-incendiaries

  INTERVIEW WITH R.O. KWON, AUTHOR OF THE INCENDIARIES
  Jimin Han
  June 6, 2018
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  The Incendiaries (New York: Riverhead, 2018)

  In her debut novel, THE INCENDIARIES, R.O. Kwon gives new meaning to the concept of a love triangle. Set on a college campus, we’re introduced to Will, a student who knows a thing or two about fervor, talks about an explosion and sets into motion questions about how that came to be. At the heart of piecing together the mystery behind the explosion is Will’s passionate love for Phoebe, another college student who carries with her a grief that makes her reckless, and her relationship with a man named John Leal, who draws to him those seeking a higher purpose in a cult-like organization. Recently, I was fortunate to have a conversation with Kwon about experiences in her life as a Korean American writer, her writing process, West Coast-East Coast comparisons and Fuji apples.

  Jimin Han: Can we start with the origin of the story and how these characters came to you?

  R.O. Kwon: At its core, the story came from my having grown up deeply religious, then having left the faith when I was 17. It was incredibly painful. I remember feeling so desperately lonely. I not only couldn't find my experience reflected in my friends and family, but I also didn't see my experience in books — which felt even worse, in a way, because books were where I'd always found companionship and camaraderie. When I set out to write this book I was in grad school, and I was and am still affected by what happened by having lost that faith. I wanted to write for that 17-year-old girl. I wanted to write about what it was to fall out of religion, but I also really wanted to write about what it was to fall into religion. I hoped to write about both parts; the loss and the joy of it. That was the first inspiration for the novel.

  JH: Was there a particular incident that caused you to lose your faith?

  ROK: No, it wasn't anything in particular. It happened gradually and then all at once. I was raised to be religious and then, in high school, I fell into a fervently charismatic, evangelical Christianity that was very popular in my age group. My high school was something like 80% Asian, predominantly Korean, so I fell into a very fervent, very Korean variety of Christianity. But as I was getting increasingly religious, I was also reading a lot, so I kept encountering other worldviews. According to what I heard when I went to services, a lot of the fictional and nonfictional people I was reading about would be going to hell. It was hard to believe that all these people were condemned to hell because they didn't subscribe to a particular set of beliefs. There’s also the question of evil, which troubles a lot of people who leave the faith: what kind of an all-powerful, omniscient being wouldn’t prevent evil? That question became larger and larger, and eventually it was one I couldn't ignore.

  JH: How did this affect your friendships, your relationship to your community?

  ROK: My friends were supportive in that they were praying for me, and they wanted to bring me back from apostasy, but I didn't really find companionship in terms of other newly godless people who felt as I did. I can’t really overstate how alone I felt. It was such a different worldview, to have gone from believing that I’d live forever along with everyone I loved — and that there's an omnipotent, wonderful being who's taking care of everything — to more or less believing that, if I’m lucky, I'll get maybe 70ish years of life, after which I’ll turn back to dust.

  JH: I think there are many who have gone through that experience, especially as Asian Americans. Was there anything that helped you emerge from that experience?

  ROK: That's a good question. Toward the end of that year, I went to college, so I went from a world in which almost everyone I knew was Christian to a world in which almost no one was. And I loved college; I loved it from the minute it started. Learning to appreciate and seek out ephemeral joys became much more important to me than it had been.

  JH: Just for context, where did you grow up and where did you go to college?

  ROK: I grew up in L.A. and I went to college in Connecticut, at Yale.

  JH: Was it sort of a culture shock to be there after L.A.?

  ROK: One thing that shocked me was the fruit. After having lived in L.A. for most of my life, I just couldn't — I couldn't fathom how bad the dining hall fruit would be. The first time my mother visited me in college, she brought a giant suitcase full of Fuji apples, which was hilarious and kind of absurd: I was one person. My five suitemates and I had one tiny box refrigerator to share, so there was no way those apples could stay fresh.

  JH: So sweet. Speaking of your parents, what was their reaction to your loss of faith?

  ROK: I’m very close to my family. My parents and my brother are very religious, and they still essentially believe that I'm going through a juvenile phase, one that I'll eventually snap out of. But my family does subscribe to a liberal version of Christianity in which my mother essentially believes that everyone who's a good person is going to go to heaven.

  JH: In terms of the characters in your novel, Phoebe, Will and John Leal, can you talk about how they came to you?

  ROK: For the first two years, the entire book was narrated by just Phoebe; I showed her both gaining and losing faith in a Christian God. The book really came to life for me when I divided those experiences, gave them to two separate people. So that's when Will came into the story — he took on more of what had been Phoebe's experience.

  JH: And then John Leal, how did he come to be? Such an interesting name too: John Leal.

  ROK: John Leal wasn't part of the story for the first two years. Then, one day, while I was volunteering briefly at a Planned Parenthood, I realized that the ongoing, terrible fight over reproductive rights is one way extremist faith makes itself very visible in the United States, and eventually this led to the extremist cult and John Leal.

  JH: How about the choices to have John Leal be mixed Korean and white and having Will be white and Phoebe Korean?

  ROK: In general, it was really important to me that there be Korean characters in the book. But in terms of choices I made about John Leal being half-Korean or Phoebe being Korean — there wasn't really a choice; they showed up that way.

  JH: John Leal's background was really fascinating. How did you decide on that?

  ROK: I'd been reading a lot of accounts in North Korea because I had, or have, distant relatives in North Korea. So, for a while, I was reading everything I could find about North Korea because I felt a longing for this part of my life, my family, that I'll never get to know. And eventually, to my surprise, John Leal started taking on a North Korean past. People have asked, "How did you make sure you were getting it right?" But there is no getting it right, not when it comes to a country with the most closed borders in the world. To me, it felt important to show that uncertainty, to inhabit the ambiguity.

  JH: This leads me to your title. I saw that you had a different title at one time. Heroics? Which made me think of all the ways in which heroism figured in your book, about how Phoebe feels she should have been heroic in saving her mom’s life, and it's beautifully repeated in all these different ways with Will. And also John Leal is solidly this hero who helped people get out of North Korea. So I thought Heroics was a really effective title, but now your book has a new title.

  ROK: Thank you for saying that. When my agent sold the book, Heroics was the working title. After that, I had a period when I was in favor of making the title be Superhuman. My wonderful editor said, "That will make people think it has something to do with superheroes," and I said, "No, but I mean it in the supernatural sense, plus the Nietzschean Übermensch sense. I’m really, really glad I got talked out of that one. As for “incendiaries”: I love the richness of that word, how it has to do with bombs, but also how it contains several of the book’s central obsessions: passion, terrorism. Christians will sometimes say they're on fire for God.

  JH: I think that’s great. “Incendiaries” is very evocative. It makes you lean in and question your expectations.

  ROK: One of the hesitations I had about Heroics as a title was that it felt a little ironic, maybe too much so.

  JH: Right. So while you started with Phoebe and then added Will and John Leal, ultimately the narrative is through Will’s perspective. He tells us Phoebe would have thought this or later he found out this, so her perspective is in there but still filtered through Will.

  ROK: For a long while, Will was the only one telling the story. Then, I started adding back in the Phoebe sections, and then the John Leal sections came along. But it was always still Will telling the story, more or less, and trying to piece together what had happened. I’m so interested in how incomplete our knowledge of one another can be. So, as with the parts about John Leal having a mysterious North Korean past, I wanted to show those gaps, those fissures, rather than try to resolve them with the story.

  JH: Is there anything you want to say about being an Asian American writer, how you see yourself having been part of the Asian American community in L.A. and then going to New Haven and now living in San Francisco?

  ROK: Yes, I live in San Francisco. I didn't read any Korean American writers until after college. It was so revelatory for me to start reading Chang-rae Lee and Alex Chee and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and to start seeing any of that part of myself reflected on the page — which is where I spend so much of my time. And now, it's so exciting that I can read and know of so many Asian American writers and Korean American writers, and it's really important to me that I support and amplify other marginalized voices. I'm in a fantastic, supportive karaoke group with other Asian American women writers. We’ll read a book and we'll talk about it, and then we'll go out and sing karaoke and it's so fun. I love them dearly. I wish everyone could have that.

  JH: I’m surprised you didn’t read Asian American writers until after college. I grew up in this totally white town and blamed it on that, but you grew up in a predominately Asian American community. I thought that in L.A. there would have been more exposure to Asian American writers and their books.

  ROK: I did read a little Amy Tan when I was in high school, but no, I didn't hear of Chang-rae Lee until after college. I hope the situation’s better now — I think Asian American writers are a lot more visible than they were when I was in high school.

  JH: What are your thoughts about the #MeToo movement as it relates to the men and women in your novel?

  ROK: In my experience of college, as well as my experience of daily life, violence was, and is, an ongoing threat. I don't know what it's like to consider walking home from my subway stop after 9:00 pm without wondering if I'm going to be safe. In my novel, there's a pivotal incident of sexual violence that I tried really hard to take out. I didn't want it to be there for a number of reasons; as I kept trying to rewrite it, though, I realized that it had to be there, that it was what the character would do in that situation. There are ways in which I think and hope the book is deeply feminist.

  JH: I like how it raises the question of how reliable you are in knowing yourself, especially at that age in college and at any time in your life. So what are you doing next? What projects are you working on?

  ROK: I’ve been working on a second novel for what amounts to about two years. Pretty much all I can say is that it has to deal with women artists and ambition. Also, there’s a lot of sex. Also, I'm editing an anthology with Garth Greenwell of literary fiction that features kink and BDSM, and we're really excited about that.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/07/29/633544364/religious-fundamentalism-explored-in-the-incendiaries

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  Religious Fundamentalism Explored In 'The Incendiaries'
  6:25
  DOWNLOAD
  TRANSCRIPT
  July 29, 20188:02 AM ET
  Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
  Boy transfers from Bible college. Boy meets girl. Girl joins a cult. Boy tries to save girl. NPR's Renee Montagne talks to R.O. Kwon about her first novel, The Incendiaries.

  RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

  Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet at a prestigious East Coast college, and they begin dating. Will has just transferred from a Bible college. Phoebe has abandoned the music career she dreamed of. Will has lost his religion, while Phoebe has lost her mother. Hovering over their grief and guilt is a violent religious cult that seems to offer Phoebe a way out. The novel "The Incendiaries" begins with an explosion. A building falls, and people die. It's R.O. Kwon's first novel. She joined me from our studios in San Francisco to talk about it. Welcome.

  R.O. KWON: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

  MONTAGNE: This story is told from three perspectives. There's Will. There's Phoebe. And there's another character, John Leal, who is the leader of that Christian cult that Phoebe joins. Explain to us - Phoebe starts out as a young woman who drinks and is having fun at parties, but there's something missing, obviously. And there's this pain of her mother dying. Tell us more about that.

  KWON: It's true. She doesn't really have a sense of purpose. Not only has she lost her mother, but, not long before she comes to college, she's given up the piano. And she really did believe that she was going to be a professional pianist. And so she is and was a very ambitious woman, a very driven woman, a very disciplined woman who no longer has any of that to give her life structure. And so she's drawn to both Will and to John Leal for different reasons. But they both offer - they - John Leal and Will do not lack for discipline or structure or a sense of purpose.

  MONTAGNE: But as she's pulled into this cult, Will starts wanting to save her. But can he? Can he save Phoebe?

  KWON: Will has a desire to save people in general. It was part of what made him such an effective Christian and such an effective evangelist. And so I think that that definitely bleeds over into his relationship with Phoebe. And no, he doesn't seem likely to succeed.

  MONTAGNE: And then there's John Leal, who is a bit shady...

  KWON: (Laughter).

  MONTAGNE: ....Fascinating, though. But you never get inside him. And you're never even sure if his story is true.

  KWON: John Leal - he tells fascinating stories about himself, about having volunteered at the North Korea-China border, about having been in a North Korean gulag. And in a lot of ways, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not.

  MONTAGNE: And is it also possibly accurate to say for a creator and leader of a cult that it's pretty hard to get inside their heads?

  KWON: I suppose I should say yes so that I don't worry my family and my parents. But, in some ways, John Leal was the easiest for me to write.

  MONTAGNE: Huh.

  KWON: Yes (laughter).

  MONTAGNE: What would worry your parents about that?

  KWON: I think John Leal - well, so much of his appeal is dependent on language, on the stories he can tell. And so I think - I was never in a cult. But, at some point, I was involved with a youth group that was so absorbing that a lot of our parents were concerned it might be a cult. It wasn't. But I've had my own experiences with charismatic preachers, with charismatic youth leaders. And I think I was accessing a part of me that not only loved that and was drawn to that but could channel that.

  MONTAGNE: You write about Will's loss of religion quite beautifully. Read for us a little section about his inner thoughts on that.

  KWON: OK. (Reading) I tried not to leave the faith. I'd had such purpose living in single-minded pursuit of the God I loved until the afternoon I knelt in my bedroom asking one last time for a sign. White gauze curtains rippled. I waited. But I heard nothing else. Muscles stiff, I got up. I should, I think, have told Phoebe how cut open I felt since then with a God-shaped hole I didn't know how to fill. If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn't been able to stop loving him, this made-up ghost I still grieved as though he'd been real.

  MONTAGNE: I understand that you yourself had a difficult separation from religion.

  KWON: Yes, I did. I did. It was extremely painful.

  MONTAGNE: You were raised as a Catholic?

  KWON: Yes. I was raised as a Catholic. But at my most religious, I was spending a lot of time going to various - to my friends' Protestant churches. I grew up in a town and in a school that's predominantly Asian-American in LA. And it's also, on top of that, predominantly Korean-American, which is what I am. And the churches I went to were very fervid. There was a lot of people falling to the floor, a lot of people talking in tongues. It was a very charismatic kind of Christianity. And I loved it so much. It was so wonderful. And for me, it was not only so painful to leave the faith. It remains painful. I'm still grieving it. I still love God - is what I've realized over time. It's just that I don't think he's real. Augustine has a line that I love that - to say I love you is to say I want you to be. And I think that's how I feel about the Christian God.

  MONTAGNE: All of your characters are hurting. They're in their own worlds of pain. So how does this question of God and religion and belief and something to have to heal the pain, I suppose you would say - how does that bring them together and also puts them at odds?

  KWON: I think that when people are hurt - I think when people are grieving and in pain - or at least I know I did. I tend to shy away from generalizations. I know when I'm hurt and I'm in pain, I become more open to an elsewhere. And so I think that for my characters, too, they're open to other kinds of answers than the ones that they've been using. They have that in common. But they do, of course, end up coming to different answers.

  MONTAGNE: R.O. Kwon's first novel is "The Incendiaries." Thank you so much for joining us.

  KWON: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

  Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Print Marked Items
Accept the Mystery
Laura Miller
The New Yorker.
94.22 (July 30, 2018): p65.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Laura Miller
Accept the Mystery
A debut novel about faith, loss, and violence.
tifPhotograph by Mimi Plumb for The New YorkerIn R. O. Kwon's novel, a campus oddball emerges as a
charismatic cult leader.65
"People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from
guilt, rules," observes Will Kendall, one of the three central characters in "The Incendiaries," R. O. Kwon's
debut novel. In fiction, there's a corollary: to the nonbelieving reader, a character's religious fervor can be a
hindrance. Reading a novel requires, if not outright belief, the willing suspension of its opposite. The
characters in fiction may be invented, but the concerns and the passions that propel them-love, ambition,
anger, fear, curiosity, desire, loneliness-are ones that everyone shares. When an imaginary character cares
most deeply about a god who seems equally imaginary, the spell can weaken; a reader may impatiently
wonder when the character will wise up and throw off these phantasmal chains. Will, a former evangelical
Christian, remembers standing at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf with his fellow-believers after a day of
preaching, holding hands and "calling out in tongues." For him, the memory of that day is ecstatic, and the
loss of that faith, that joy, is a devastation. For the skeptical reader, it's a relief; his grief is far more
intelligible than his piety.
Faith-its loss, its kindling, and its susceptibility to being twisted into something monstrous-is Kwon's theme
here, but so is grief, which often drives us into faith's arms. All of the young characters in "The
Incendiaries," students and ex-students at a liberal-arts college in the Hudson River Valley, are, like Will, in
mourning, but none more flamboyantly so than John Leal. John, the sort of oddball character who often
ends up kicking around college towns-he walks everywhere barefoot-gradually assembles a band of
disciples who will, in the course of the novel, morph from a community of Christian seekers into a cult
capable of extraordinary violence.
John is the son of a Korean mother and a white father, and he was kidnapped in his early twenties by agents
of North Korea on the Chinese side of the border while he was helping to smuggle refugees out. In the
Pyongyang prison camp where he ended up, he witnessed many atrocities, including guards kicking a
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pregnant girl in the belly. He tried to aid her, but she and her child soon died. After his release from the
gulag, the woman came to him in dreams, barefoot-a sign that he should go shoeless as well. Or perhaps, as
John sometimes tells it, he helped the girl abort her "half-foreign" fetus, thereby somehow saving her life.
John recounts this formative trauma multiple times, but the details of his narrative-like the dreams they
inspire-keep shifting. What exactly happened to John in Korea, if he ever went there at all, is one of this
austere novel's many enigmas. Kwon evades the pitfalls of the religious novel by giving them the widest
possible berth. Here are a handful of facts, she seems to say, if they even are facts. Make of them what you
will.
Will encounters John through Phoebe Haejin Lin, a young woman Will meets while crashing a college
party. Her languorous dancing captivates him. An indifferent student, Phoebe runs with a campus crowd of
madcap partyers and pranksters right out of "Brideshead Revisited." She seems an unlikely candidate for
cult membership. Smart and popular, she comes from independent stock: her mother left Seoul, where she
was trapped in a subjugated role in the household of her husband's family, and took the infant Phoebe to Los
Angeles, where she later urged her daughter to pursue the piano and refused to teach her to cook-the idea
being, as Phoebe explains, "if I didn't learn how to be in the kitchen, no one could keep me there."
But their fierce mother-daughter bond was severed by an automobile accident. Phoebe was driving, and her
mother died when she flung herself across her child's body to shield her from the impact. Phoebe blames
herself, and her anguish is still so raw that the sight of an affectionate mother and child on the street leaves
her "feral with longing" and wishing that a taxi would run them over; let the whole world suffer as she is
suffering.
Will, Phoebe, and John are the triumvirate whose perspectives dominate "The Incendiaries." But really the
novel radiates from Will; he's trying to make sense of how Phoebe, the high-spirited girl he'd fallen in love
with for her "pagan mind," fell under John's influence and went on to engineer five abortion-clinic
bombings in a single day. The chapters told from Phoebe's and John's perspectives represent Will's attempts
to imagine what these two were thinking and feeling. Will ought to know all the tricks John uses for
winning converts, he figures, having used most of them himself in his evangelical days. This was before the
afternoon when he knelt on his bedroom floor and asked God to help him quiet his doubts, only to get up
knowing "I'd been pleading with no one." Yet how can he counteract faith's lovely illusions, especially the
promise of an eventual reunion with the beloved dead? He of all people knows how much sustenance can be
found in belief. He longs for it every day.
"The Incendiaries" is so parsimonious with description as to seem nearly starved of it. Kwon makes few
attempts to summon an atmosphere or to flaunt arresting imagery, although when she does-Will driving at
night, looking in windows where "intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like
drowned statues"-she acquits herself beautifully. Unmoored in a hazy approximation of the present, the
novel shows no interest in realistically depicting the mediated lives of contemporary college students. The
characters do have cell phones (although they never send text messages), and occasionally look up news
stories on their laptops. Yet their lives are untouched by social media, and they appear rarely to have seen a
movie or watched television. They listen to Ella Fitzgerald, not hip-hop or pop. Combined with the
cloistered milieu of the campus setting, this absence of social texture gives "The Incendiaries" a fairy-tale
quality reminiscent of Donna Tartt's "The Secret History."
But, unlike Tartt's undergraduate aesthetes, Kwon's characters become so fixated on abstractions and
transcendence that the sensual world scarcely matters to them-with one exception. For Will, Phoebe is the
sole focus of his reverent attention, like a patch of landscape illuminated by a sunbeam on a stormy day. He
recalls the "minute, fish-scale veins" that "patterned Phoebe's eyelids in faint blue," and the moment when,
as she walked toward him on the street, her "beige coat halves rose, floating behind bared legs."
This is the omnivorous observational hunger of love, but also of thwarted possessiveness, and when Phoebe
begins to drift from his grasp, Will-by his very name the opposite of graceful acceptance-betrays her in the
worst possible way. The territorial carnality of Will's love imbues a scene in which the couple first visit
John's house for dinner. John picks up Phoebe's handbag and casually begins rummaging through it, a
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transgression that shocks Will but leaves Phoebe unruffled. "He dipped his fingers into the bag's opal slit,"
Will notices. "The bright satin lining showed. I'd have liked to stop him, but she let it happen. The bag
might as well have been his." The libidinal forces underpinning all the lofty God talk in the novel flash into
sight with that satin lining.
Does it matter that John and Phoebe are of Korean descent and Will is not? Not as Will sees it, although,
according to John, Korea is "a land of purists," which has "dispatched more Christian apostles abroad than
any nation but the U.S." Will imagines John in the gulag, marvelling over his fellow-prisoners' unflagging
devotion to the Dear Leader, whose arbitrary laws had them so brutally punished over trifles. "Some people
needed leading," John decides. "In or out of the gulag, they craved faith. But think if the tyrant had been as
upright as his disciples trusted him to be. The heights he'd have achieved, if he loved them." Yet race
remains a muted factor in "The Incendiaries" compared with class. Will, a scholarship boy, scrambles to
suss out the milieu that the wealthy Phoebe inhabits seemingly without effort, concealing the restaurant job
he works on the side to make ends meet and scouring thrift shops for polo shirts "in pink, azure, and apple
green, the bizarrely colorful regalia of the ruling class."
John's ruminations on human docility sound like plausible first steps on the slippery path to messianic cult
leadership, but "The Incendiaries" is less persuasive in its depiction of how Phoebe becomes radicalized.
Grief, with its inwardly turning corkscrew of pain, seems a literary novelist's idea of motivation: broody and
deep. But private loss tends to foster a private faith. Cults and religious extremists are more likely to target
lost souls and would-be adventurers looking for a purpose than quiet mourners. It is the emptiness of their
lives, not the heaviness of their hearts, that makes young people ripe for the recruiters.
Sometimes Phoebe sounds like this sort of convert. "If I did what people do here," she says to Will about
their classmates, "if I chased high-paid jobs, and I wrote fifteen-page papers on Milton, I have no idea who
that would help." And, indeed, when John first approaches her outside a night club, his initial pitch is "Call
me when you're tired of wasting this life." At other times, Phoebe seems propelled into the cult by its
promise to invert her guilt over her mother's death: "If I, if you, can be so much at fault, think how powerful
you and I will be" once invested with the power of perfect faith. But sometimes she claims to be acting as if
she believes absolutely in the hope that acting will make it so. There's her anger at Will, too, and the heady
experience of the cult's group-confession rituals. What pushes Phoebe over the brink and into violence
might be any of these things, or all of them, or something else entirely. Kwon refuses to signal any
definitive reason.
If Phoebe's radicalization remains opaque, perhaps that's due to the unfathomable nature of such
transformations. Or perhaps it's because the reader, like Will himself, must struggle to understand what's
been withheld from him. "This has been the cardinal fiction of my life," he explains, "its ruling principle: if
I work hard enough, I'll get what I want." But his striving is the antithesis of faith or grace, just as his
clutching at Phoebe never allows her to give her love freely. "The Incendiaries" seeds such paradoxes in the
mind of the reader. It doesn't force them. It is full of absences and silence. Its eerie, sombre power is more a
product of what it doesn't explain than of what it does. It's the rare depiction of belief that doesn't kill the
thing it aspires to by trying too hard. It makes a space, and then steps away to let the mystery in.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Miller, Laura. "Accept the Mystery." The New Yorker, 30 July 2018, p. 65. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A549269458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c41efa6.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A549269458
9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1538244011416 4/5
Kwon, R.O.: THE INCENDIARIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kwon, R.O. THE INCENDIARIES Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 31 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1389-0
A first-time novelist explores identity, deception, and obsession.
"In the estival heat, he set his back against the cold stone of a tomb. He plucked a honeysuckle stalk
sprouting from what had once been men; he sipped its bit of juice. In time, lying in the dirt, he, too, might
nourish future pilgrims. If he had one petition for himself, it was this: that he be made useful." How one
reacts to this passage is almost certainly an indicator of how one will react to this novel as a whole. Readers
who delight in encountering seldom-used words and precise depictions of physical and mental landscapes
are likely to love Kwon's writerly style. Her book is shot through with carefully limned descriptions and
unexpected language--"orphic," "sacerdotal," "shibboleths," "harlequin." Readers who are interested in plot
and character, however, may well be less satisfied despite the fact that the basic elements of a gripping story
are present. Will Kendall is a poor kid and a lapsed evangelical. When he arrives at Edwards University, he
invents a preppy persona to hide the fact that he's waiting tables to support himself and his mother. Phoebe
Lin was a child prodigy, the product of her own gifts and her Korean immigrant mother's aspirations for her.
Phoebe's decision to quit the piano and her mother's death leave her unmoored when she arrives at Edwards.
And then there's John Leal, a charismatic Edwards dropout who has become a cult leader. It's clear from the
beginning that these three characters are moving toward cataclysm, but....The narrative is so slow and so
superficial that the climax is anticlimactic. The biggest problem is that Will is both the dominant voice and
the least interesting character, which diminishes the reader's ability to understand Phoebe and John. This
does make some thematic sense, in that Kwon is clearly interested in performative selfhood and the inability
of truly understanding another person, but....This leaves the reader with an outsider's perspective.
Aesthetically pleasing but narratively underwhelming.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kwon, R.O.: THE INCENDIARIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294039/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2547ff75.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294039
9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1538244011416 5/5
The Incendiaries
Publishers Weekly.
265.19 (May 7, 2018): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Incendiaries
R.O. Kwon. Riverhead, $26 (224p) ISBN 978-07352-1389-0
Written in dazzling, spare prose, Kwon's debut tells the fractured story of three young people looking for
something to believe in while attending the prestigious Edwards University. There's Will Kendall, a onetime
"kid evangelist" who transferred from a Bible college after losing his faith in God. He soon meets--and
falls in love with--Pheobe Lin, a Korean-American pianist wrestling with the death of her mother in an
accident for which she blames herself. And then there's John Leal, a charismatic cult leader and former
Edwards student who claims to have been held captive in North Korea; he offers Phoebe the supposedly
noble cause she craves. Will watches in horror as Phoebe joins Leal's so-called Jejah, a circle of quasireligious
radicals that soon sinks into right-wing terrorism targeting abortion clinics. Phoebe disappears
following a fatal accident involving members of her group, leaving Will to untangle Leal's web of deceit
and find out what happened to Phoebe. Kwon's novel expertly addresses questions of faith and identity
while managing to be formally inventive in its construction (the stream-of-consciousness style, complete
with leaps between characters, amplifies the subject matter). In this intriguing cult story, Kwon thoroughly
explores her characters' motivations, making for an urgent and disarming debut. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Incendiaries." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 42. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858649/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aabd85a6.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858649

Miller, Laura. "Accept the Mystery." The New Yorker, 30 July 2018, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A549269458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "Kwon, R.O.: THE INCENDIARIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294039/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018. "The Incendiaries." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858649/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.

• The Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-incendiaries-is-the-most-buzzed-about-debut-of-the-summer-as-it-should-be/2018/07/20/b6056d12-8b68-11e8-a345-a1bf7847b375_story.html?utm_term=.3f034107917c
  Word count: 933

  Books Review
  ‘The Incendiaries’ is the most buzzed-about debut of the summer, as it should be

  By Ron Charles
  Critic, Book World
  July 23

  (Riverhead)
  “The Incendiaries” is a sharp little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye. You keep blinking at these pages, struggling to bring the story into some comforting focus, convinced you can look past its unsettling intimations. But R.O. Kwon, the 35-year-old Korean American author, doesn’t make it easy to get her debut out of your system.

  At its core, “The Incendiaries” is about religious fervor, which has long functioned as America’s nuclear fuel: useful and energizing, except when it melts down and explodes. The Pilgrims, after all, were motivated by faith in their special calling. So, too, were the members of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. But nuance is the first thing sacrificed in most arguments about the relative blessings and dangers of faith — which is what makes “The Incendiaries” so unusual and enticing.

  The novel comes to us as a series of intense memories pieced together in the wake of tragedy. Through most of these short chapters, it’s not entirely clear who’s doing the remembering and who’s doing the piecing. Kwon’s crisp, poetic style conveys events that feel lightly obscured by fog, just enough to be disorienting without being frustrating.

  Three Korean Americans meet at a university in the Northeast. Will is a shy, hard-working student who recently transferred from a Bible college. He’s immediately entranced by Phoebe, the center of the campus party scene. “She lived as if spotlit,” Kwon writes, “each laugh evidential, loud.” Both these young people come under the influence of John Leal, a charismatic former student who was captured and released by the North Koreans.

  One of the cleverest aspects of “The Incendiaries” is the way Kwon suggests that all three of these people are lying, though for different reasons and with wildly different repercussions. Embarrassed by his poverty, Will pretends that he can afford to participate in the college’s ritzy social scene. Phoebe’s ebullient persona masks a traumatic past and a fierce battle with depression. And John, who permanently gave up shoes after walking barefoot across the Yalu River into China, radiates a magnetism that makes everything he says sound messianic — and dubious. “He wasn’t just his Lord’s child,” Kwon writes, “he often had to be His substitute.”

  “The Incendiaries” complicates the story of religious fanaticism by forcing us to acknowledge strains that are typically ignored. For all Americans’ talk of their exceptional God-trusting, John notes that “no one was more spiritual than Koreans could be; no believers, more devoted. It was a land of purists.” John first glimpsed this astonishing capacity for devotion in a North Korean prison camp, where people being starved and beaten to death nonetheless “maintained that the beloved sovereign, a divine being, couldn’t be to blame.” He realizes that “some people needed leading. In or out of the gulag, they craved faith.” When he gets back to America, his mission is born — and he targets Phoebe.

  The story that develops is largely about Will’s faltering efforts to woo Phoebe even as she slips under the influence of what may be a dangerous cult. And if you’ve ever cared for someone drawn into the orbit of a religious fanatic, you’ll appreciate just how precarious his situation is. After all, the essential defense mechanism of any cult is its ability to anticipate and disarm objections, to cast all detractors as suspect and jealous enemies. Kwon brilliantly portrays Will’s struggle as he realizes that he may have to lose Phoebe to save her.

  The author R.O. Kwon. (Smeeta Mahanti)
  But Will’s deeper predicament is that he truly understands the unearthly pleasure of discipleship. Despite having abandoned his mother’s Christian church, he still feels the presence of his old faith like a phantom limb. “People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation,” he says, “a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn’t forget was the joy I’d known, loving Him. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing — the old, lost hope revived. I was tantalized with what John Leal said was possible: I wished him to be right.”

  Such rare insights arise all through “The Incendiaries,” which is full of longing and muffled agony. Kwon, who was raised Roman Catholic and has said that she lost her faith in her teens, seems to understand with extraordinary sympathy just what that loss entails. And as her debut novel catches fire and burns toward its feverish conclusion, she offers a strikingly clear articulation of the fanatic’s mind-set: It’s not an excess of belief that drives some believers to violence; it’s a maddening lack of belief, which requires that radical action be substituted for faith.

  In a nation still so haunted by the divine promise, on the cusp of ever-more contentious debates about abortion and other intrinsically spiritual issues, “The Incendiaries” arrives at precisely the right moment.

  Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com. On Sept. 14 at 7 p.m., R.O. Kwon will be at Politics and Prose Union Market, 1270 Fifth St. NE.

  THE INCENDIARIES
  By R.O. Kwon

  Riverhead. 224 pp. $26

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/books/review/incendiaries-ro-kwon.html
  Word count: 1040

  FICTION

  When First Love Is as Lethal as Religious Extremism
  Image
  R.O. KwonCreditCreditSmeeta Mahanti
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  By Thu-Huong Ha
  July 24, 2018

  THE INCENDIARIES
  By R.O. Kwon
  224 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.

  “Think of charm as a verb, not a trait,” Gavin de Becker writes in his 1997 best seller, “The Gift of Fear,” in a chapter on predators. Charm is an ability, not a passive feature, he writes, and it almost always has a motive.

  In R. O. Kwon’s radiant debut novel, “The Incendiaries,” her two central figures are the perpetrators, and victims, of the act of charm. They twist against the barbed wire of human connection in an isolating world. This is a dark, absorbing story of how first love can be as intoxicating and dangerous as religious fundamentalism.

  Will and Phoebe meet during the still-sweaty first days of the college school year. Phoebe is a Korean-born, California-raised freshman of relative means whose evident sexual confidence ensnares the ex-born-again, working-class Will. Each of their narratives is told in the first person, interspersed with brief chapters about John Leal, a fanatical Christian cult leader whose grip over Phoebe grows in parallel with hers over Will.

  The novel is about extremism, yes, but it’s for anyone who’s ever been captivated by another; for anyone who has been on either side of a relationship that clearly has a subject and object of obsession; for anyone who’s had a brush with faith, or who’s been fully bathed in its teachings; for anyone afraid of his or her own power.

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  Kwon makes real two characters who are, at first, types. Phoebe, in the book’s opening pages, commands with her only-child, rich-girl arrogance, a ponytailed, Korean-American version of the familiar manic pixie dream girl. “I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I’d have no space left to fit my own,” Phoebe says. As her story goes on, the reader learns that she once glittered with promise as a piano prodigy, her discipline now replaced by casual self-destruction after the grief and guilt of being involved with her mother’s death in a car accident.

  Will, waiting tables to pay for pâté, lies hopeless next to his girlfriend, consumed. But he, too, transcends his role as the stable, economically beleaguered Eagle Scout, before he falls completely from grace.

  Image
  Power, along with charm, is also an act in this novel. Phoebe mostly holds power over Will, the wounded enchantress who receives his love. As she slips farther into fanaticism and the arms of John Leal, Will is driven desperately and jealously to his own retaliatory exertion of control.

  Kwon’s ornate language adds a creeping anachronism to the chapters. Its metaphors seem accessible at first, but take a bit of parsing: “I lifted Phoebe’s hand; I kissed bitten nails that shine, in hindsight, like quartz, spoils I pulled down from the moon.” Throughout, objects are vaguely animated, as if someone is recalling the story years later: Frisbees soar, oil drips, bare shoulders roll. Early on, “punch-stained red cups split underfoot, opening into plastic petals.”

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  From Leal’s first appearance, he’s a harbinger of chaos. A former student with a shady back story as a prisoner in North Korea, he looms over the narrative, peppering the shifting, unsettling timeline of the love story. As Will and Phoebe picnic with mulled wine, make summer plans, rent a weekend house at the beach, Leal casts an ominous shadow for the reader, his chapters delivering a piecemeal sermon as he slowly and steadily pulls the young couple’s strings and lays out, log by log, what will be his final masterpiece: a pyre.

  As the narrative escalates, the reader goes from a sane friend in a bar, listening impatiently as the storyteller gabs on about a new beau, red flags firing off in her head (Do you not see what’s happening?), to a paralyzed spectator of a five-car pileup on the TV screen. Each horrible act mounts on the others, as Phoebe’s narratives get closer and closer in tone and content to Leal’s.

  On top of his pyre, Phoebe — a vessel through which life, or God, has poured trauma, grief, shame, discipline, love, loss of purpose and a desire to please — is splayed. It’s Will who strikes the match.

  The action picks up quickly in the final chapters. (Readers may want to skip the jacket description, which contains a giant spoiler.) A wedge has been driven between the young lovers, and Will is left trying to piece together what happened to his grinning, gin-doling girlfriend. The details become sketchy and speculative; the narratives become unreliable.

  This unusual novel, both raw and finely wrought, leaves the reader with very few answers and little to rely on. A love triangle between a young man, a young woman and a higher purpose is torched, with few witnesses to say what happened. Unsettled by all the charming that’s gone up in flames, Will and the reader are left alone together holding the ashes, some of the embers still burning to leave scars.

  Thu-Huong Ha is a books and culture reporter for Quartz and the author of the Y.A. novel “Hail Caesar.”

  A version of this article appears in print on July 28, 2018, on Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Toxic Romance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634581276/the-incendiaries-is-an-angsty-back-to-school-novel-about-believing-in-god
  Word count: 802

  REVIEW
  BOOK REVIEWS
  'The Incendiaries' Is An Angsty Back-To-School Novel About Believing In God
  7:01
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  August 1, 20181:32 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air

  MAUREEN CORRIGAN

  Fresh Air

  The Incendiaries
  The Incendiaries
  by R. O. Kwon

  Hardcover, 214 pages purchase

  R. O. Kwon's pensive debut novel, The Incendiaries, arrives just in time to stoke up "back-to-school" anxieties, especially those of entering college students and their nervous parents.

  The Incendiaries is a campus novel, and so, true to form, it charts a well-worn path from eager innocence to bruised experience. Think of classic campus novels like F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Donna Tartt's The Secret History — or even farther afield narratives like Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons and Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell.

  However it riffs on the particulars, the standard campus novel always features an impressionable main character destined to fall under the spell of a charismatic professor — or another student, or a closed club or, perhaps rarest of all, an academic subject. Whether the infatuation is sexual, social or intellectual, the once naïve protagonist always pays for the experience in pain and a permanent case of wistfulness.

  The Incendiaries tweaks the conventional campus novel formula in a few crucial ways: First of all, some of the key characters here are Korean-American. Phoebe Lin is a beautiful first-year student going off the rails at the elite and fictitious Edwards University.

  Phoebe was raised to be a concert pianist, but she came to doubt her own gifts. When her mother died in a car accident, Phoebe fell into a long tailspin of guilt. She is, therefore, ripe for manipulation when she arrives at Edwards and meets a mysterious character named John Leal outside a club one night.

  An older drop-out from Edwards, Leal is half-Korean and boasts of a past that includes time spent in a North Korean prison. He's also perfected the art of the come-on line. He tells Phoebe at the end of their first encounter: "I'd love to see you again, ... It's up to you, though. Call me when you're tired of wasting this life."

  It turns out that what Leal really has in mind is drawing Phoebe into the extremist religious group he's established on campus. Watching this seduction unfold with horror is Phoebe's boyfriend, Will Kendall, a sophomore transfer from a Bible college.

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  R.O. Kwon Discusses 'The Incendiaries'
  Will is that other mainstay of the campus novel: the alienated scholarship student. Obliged to wait tables to make ends meet, he cynically passes judgment on his fellow students at Edwards, who, he says, seem to have been "admitted into this pinnacle of learning with the single purpose ... of having fun."

  Clearly, Kwon shares Will's low estimation of the intellectual curiosity of the average undergrad: I'm pretty sure this is the first campus novel I've read that doesn't include even one classroom scene. Personally, I would have liked a few, along with a more sweeping panorama of student life on the Edwards' campus, but Kwon isn't interested in academic satire or a collegiate novel of manners.

  Instead, in The Incendiaries, Kwon vividly explores a subject that's rarely raised in mainstream novels about life on campus these days: that is, the allure of a belief in God — or at least the things that a belief in God provides.

  In the force of his certitude, John Leal is like a John Brown figure, drawing his followers into a community (or cult) and inciting them to activism. The younger characters here are vulnerable because they wobble in doubt.

  That's especially true of Will, who left Bible college because he lost his faith; yet, he still yearns for it with the resentment of one who's been deeply disappointed: "I used to love imagining [God's] hand upon me, [Will tells us]. The God I followed had been as real to me as a living person — more real, since I'd put so much into inventing him."

  Kwon structures her novel as a fractured flashback in which all the characters get their say; so, from the opening page of The Incendiaries we know things don't end well. Sometimes Kwon's style can get a bit too doggedly lyrical, but she's deft at moving the plot toward its explosive climax.

  In The Incendiaries Kwon has created a singular version of the campus novel; it turns out to be a story about spiritual uncertainty and about the fierce and undisciplined desire of her young characters to find something luminous to light their way through their lives.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/08/02/634677368/the-incendiaries-is-a-poignant-and-powerful-look-at-campus-life
  Word count: 868

  REVIEW
  BOOK REVIEWS
  'The Incendiaries' Is A Poignant And Powerful Look At Campus Life
  August 2, 20187:00 AM ET
  JEAN ZIMMERMAN

  The Incendiaries
  The Incendiaries
  by R. O. Kwon

  Hardcover, 214 pages purchase

  Rivaling Donna Tartt's celebrated debut, A Secret History, in its fevered treatment of American university life, R.O. Kwon's first novel The Incendiaries gives readers a juicy look at campus mores, though sometimes that juice is more bitter than sweet. Hormonal fumblings in the dark halls of post-adolescence can be painfully entertaining and entertainingly painful — I am reminded of what Lena Dunham's middle-aged gynecologist tells her character on Girls, after listening to Hannah's jejune blathering: "You could not pay me enough to be 24 again." Instead, we can rely on intense smarties like Kwon to tell us all about it.

  In The Incendiaries, men and women on the cusp of adulthood bring loaded back stories to their couplings and uncouplings, leading inexorably (and a bit predictably) to tragic results. (Not a spoiler; the author spoils it for us on the second page, writing, "Buildings fell. People died.")

  Phoebe Haejin Lin's unhappy past is at odds with her high-rolling life at a fictional school called Edwards, somewhere in the northeastern United States. She has become the campus It Girl, the ravishing one everyone wants to sleep with, wants to be. While others see only surface perfection — her long, glossy black hair, flawless skin and exquisite features — we get the real story in the character's first-person confessionals. The death of her mother in a car accident haunts her; an inexperienced Phoebe was at the wheel and her mom threw her body across that of her daughter to protect her. Another, more minor, secret: Phoebe was a piano prodigy until she abruptly quit, realizing she could never measure up to the masters. The failure dogs her.

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  More Is More In Donna Tartt's Believable, Behemoth 'Goldfinch'
  Religious Fundamentalism Explored In 'The Incendiaries'
  Working-class Will Kendall knows nothing of Phoebe's troubled background — and he has secrets of his own. A fish out of water at Edwards, Will tells lies about the seedy town he's from in Southern California, trying to fit by layering colored polo shirts he cannot afford. He also hides a bumpy evangelical past, when as a teenager he found Christ and traveled to Beijing as a missionary. His confessions about losing his religion represent some of the most compelling parts of the story, as he describes "how cut open I felt since then, with a God-shaped hole I didn't know how to fill." Will's destitute, mentally ill mother relies on the paltry sums he sends home, earned by waiting tables at a local eatery — and at the Ivy League-styled Edwards, such part-time jobs are most definitely not part of the social equation.

  A month into their first semester, Will and Phoebe meet cute at a party. She spills a drink down his pants, then holds him mesmerized, dancing in front of him with sinuous raised arms. Their affair takes off like a Roman candle. Will's extreme, amour fou infatuation with Phoebe is akin to David's for Jade in Scott Spencer's raw classic, Endless Love. In Kwon's telling, the school is an overheated, over-the-top place: At one party the birthday boy rents a pair of caged lions, with Phoebe passing off the novelty as no big deal. The text gets at the cloistered atmosphere of an elite school, where all events, no matter how trivial, are somehow meaningful, and the microcosmic is sometimes mistaken for the cosmic.

  'The Incendiaries' finds its greatest depth in the conflation of politics and faith.

  The Incendiaries finds its greatest depth in the conflation of politics and faith. A Christian cult leader named John Leal enters the stage from the extreme right. A Edwards dropout who suffered imprisonment in a North Korean gulag when doing refugee work, Leal resolves never again to wear shoes after his experience. Yes, his feet have "filth, a half-inch of skin stained black at his soles, the heels split, flaking," but his followers in the radical anti-choice group Jejah don't mind. John Leal is the wedge that drives the two lovers apart, and his hold over Will's precious Phoebe leads to The Incendaries' stunning conclusion.

  Readers will feel the pain when Phoebe deserts Will and the poor besotted boy crumbles. Some of Kwon's language delivers meaningful aperçus, while some passages simply try too hard. "Pink meat bled when I cut it open, the charred bits crunching like minute bones. A torn roll steamed; butter liquified. Oil dripped, gilding white porcelain." Capturing the intensity of the groves of academe might require this kind of elevated puffery, but at times the meat is hard to stomach. Still, Kwon delivers a poignant and powerful look into the millenial mindset. It can be rocky, but it can also rock.

  Jean Zimmerman's latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/leaps-of-doubt-in-r-o-kwons-the-incendiaries/#!
  Word count: 2004

  Leaps of Doubt in R. O. Kwon’s “The Incendiaries”
  By Anna E. Clark

  8 0 0

  JULY 31, 2018

  IS THERE ANY TIME of life more racked by yearning and uncertainty than college? Not, at least, in R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, a debut novel that cannily blurs the line between campus novel and cult lit. As Kwon depicts them, those aching years are a time for confronting the fuzziness of one’s beliefs, for wrestling with the problem of who we want to be.

  Even those of us who matriculated with less drama than Kwon’s characters will likely find something familiar in their desire for self-coherence. Mine surged forth sophomore year, when a misguided professor invited me to a kind of undergrad conservative indoctrination seminar in Savannah, Georgia. At school in Chicago, I’d often felt adrift, just another lonely skeptic avoiding the riskiness of belief. Here, though, among true foils, I watched a new, confident version of myself come into view.

  I scoffed at the tenets of limited government and made vaguely accurate Rousseau references. What I said was scattershot, but I felt like I had principles. And, I think, the same was true of my foes. In our mutual antagonism, we gave one another the feeling that we knew what we were talking about. Leveling identical charges of naïveté and muddled thought, we made ourselves make sense. There was nothing better than our own certainty.

  Certainty’s pull is something Kwon’s novel illuminates well. Already the recipient of significant attention, The Incendiaries touches on a cluster of issues that seem ripped from the headlines. Religious extremism, race, college rape, casual misogyny, North Korea, and abortion are all here in just over 200 pages. The sheer density of hot-button concerns could easily feel sensational, but the text’s immediacy feels effortless and necessary.

  Set at fictional Edwards College, an elite school on the banks of the Hudson (think Bard except it’s Princeton), The Incendiaries breaks with much college fiction to portray campus life as inseparable from the world outside the gates. Neither sanctuary nor club, the lush Edwards campus doesn’t let its students escape from anything. This is true, too, of Jejah, the Christian cult that claims one of the book’s protagonists. For Jejah’s devotees, faith in a deity is no more or less fraught than faith in others, or oneself.

  Like many stories of faith lost and pursued, Kwon’s hinges on a crisis. In the novel’s opening pages, we learn that an Edwards student named Phoebe has done something strange and awful: “Buildings fell. People died.” In other words, we see from the start where things are headed. What remains to be discovered is why.

  This is a question not just for us, but also for Kwon’s central narrator, Will, an ex-Evangelical Christian who saved souls before losing faith and fleeing to a new life at Edwards. At school, Will learns to pass for preppy, though not well enough to avoid being singled out by Phoebe as a fellow misfit. Phoebe, gifted with the ability to put others at ease, makes friends easily even as she privately flounders under a double burden of guilt and loss.

  The only daughter of long-separated Korean immigrant parents, she mourns a mother she believes died thinking her a disappointment. Still reeling from her death, Phoebe courts self-annihilation during her first months at Edwards. Walking home from the hospital after a particularly bad night, she remembers her mother protecting child-Phoebe’s body with sunscreen and wide-brimmed hats: “Such pains she’d taken, for the little I’d since become.”

  The pace in these early chapters is unhurried, the writing careful and evocative, as though the characters are attempting not so much to remember as to conjure their pasts. Doing so isn’t mere nostalgia — it’s an attempt to pinpoint the moments when things went wrong, when they saw only what they wanted to see. Recalling the heady early days of his relationship with Phoebe, Will seasons even his most exuberant memories with a note of caution: “If I could be anyone, I’d ask to be the Will rushing to see more, again, of Phoebe […] The suck and howl of a siren pierced the cold, and the fall wind smelled of reasons to live.”

  As they reflect on their relationship in alternating flashbacks (Phoebe’s mysteriously nested inside Will’s), Will and Phoebe both admit to keeping secrets. They’re so good at being what they think other people want that they don’t know how to stop even when they want to. When Phoebe starts attending what seems to be a kind of Christian support group run by John Leal, a charismatic and mysterious man who claims to have survived imprisonment in a North Korean gulag, Will is baffled by her credulousness even as he’s certain he can unmask John as the same kind of self-aggrandizing faux-Jesus-warrior that he used to be. Will admits early on that he blames himself for having been unable to save Phoebe, but as we learn more about Phoebe we come to question how well he ever knew her.

  But as Phoebe is to Will, so Will is to the reader. He’s charming but a little distant, slipping in and out of focus, his passionate self-reflection alternately earnest and performative. What we know of Phoebe is always mediated by Will, but it’s Will who remains the most inscrutable. At one point, during a summer internship in Beijing, Will spies a girl on the street buying a snack and, seeing something that intrigues him, trails her. Is his impulse curious? Protective? Predatory? We never know. The girl, sensing she’s being followed, flees in obvious and understandable terror. Instead of leaving her alone, Will becomes determined to explain that he doesn’t mean her harm, literally chasing her until she dives behind a door. Kwon ends the scene here, a move that, like so much in The Incendiaries, brilliantly turns an apparent moment of revealing self-reflection into another layer of uncertainty.

  In such passages, The Incendiaries flips a convention of the religious conversion narrative on its head. Telling a story of faith gained or lost is traditionally a way of reconciling a riven life, of making consistent what defies consistency. In one of the most classic examples, John Henry Newman’s 1864 autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (literally translated as “A Defense of His Life”), Newman describes his scandalous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism as a realization of his true self evoked by reading the Catholic proclivities of his childhood as omens. Only when he finally comes to the moment of conversion — the moment, in other words, that requires him to own what he was in order to ground his transformation into something else — does he flinch: “I feel overcome with the difficulty of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled from doing so […] For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him?”

  Describing the actual threshold of conversion would require Newman to admit momentarily that he hasn’t always been who he is, and so instead he invokes the distortions of memory to render it unseeable. Doubt becomes a bandage, a way of obscuring and attempting to heal the most profound of inconsistencies so that the coherence of faith and life he desperately desires can be maintained.

  The self-account that grapples with a painful revelation is key to conversion narratives like Newman’s. It’s essential, too, to the contemporary memoir genre that, even as it avoids pat conclusions, it often frames the storytelling act as therapeutic. For Kwon’s characters, though, divulging hurts doesn’t guarantee anything. Even the faults they admitted freely and soberly can be used against them. In The Incendiaries, telling one’s story to others never heals old wounds, it only rips them open.

  This is true not only for Will and Phoebe, but also for the novel’s secondary characters. One of Phoebe’s tactics for fitting in is allowing others to unburden themselves to her. When she first meets Julian Noh, a campus bon vivant who becomes a friend, Phoebe deflects his questions about her by telling him that she wants to know all his secrets. Months later, trust gained, he finally lets his habitual playfulness drop and confesses that his traditional Korean parents have rejected him for being gay. The confession isn’t salutary, though. It’s a source of shame laughingly diminished as soon as it’s made. Likewise, when their mutual friend Liesl publicly accuses a popular student of rape, speaking out only brings more pain. John Leal, too, uses coerced confessions to exert control over his disciples, then makes these forced revelations a pretext for supposedly curative punishment. Self-doubt in the hands of others is a weapon.

  Yet none of these characters stop wanting things to make sense or trying to align who they want to be with who they are. This desire is at the core of Phoebe’s pursuit of faith and her attachment to John. Trying to make Will understand, she speaks of a rift at the core of her identity: “People tell me I’m the whitest Asian girl they’ve met. I think they figure it’s a compliment. I’ve heard it as one. Will, I used to take pride in knowing so little about what I’m from. John Leal calls it a kind of self-hatred, and it is. He’s right. I don’t want to be this kind of person.”

  We understand Phoebe’s yearning to reclaim this part of herself, to separate who she is from the perceptions and desires others have imposed on her. Will, inadvertently underlining the point, fixates on her wanting to go to Seoul with John even though she declined to accompany him to Beijing. We may know the terrible thing Phoebe will do in the name of her faith, but that doesn’t make her conversion’s motivations less poignant or, in their own way, logical. For Phoebe, faith means not having to cover up or hate what she sees as her sins and failures. As she tells Will, “To recall those I’ve hurt, to catalog the times I’ve failed, is also to learn how to forgive. Each loss includes its redress; each evil, its pardon.”

  Phoebe’s God is an always-present interlocutor who, in knowing what she is and does, makes her cohere, hurts and all. This is part of what makes her conversion so frustrating to Will, who is always seeking and never finding the audience he craves. His own loss of faith arrives when he asks God for a sign and is met with silence. When he loses God, he loses certainty. When he loses Phoebe, he loses his ability to be a person she could love.

  Thus, a novel about a former believer’s attempt to understand a former agnostic becomes a more familiar but no less powerful story of how we use others — God included — to make sense of ourselves. This may seem strange territory for a campus novel, but in another way it’s just right. For many of us, college is the first experience that offers the terrifying opportunity for self-reinvention. It’s a seminal crucible in which we see ourselves reflected in the gaze of people we envy or hate or want or even maybe love. It’s when we may first catch sight of, if only briefly, a version of ourselves we might be able to live with.

  ¤

  Anna E. Clark is an assistant professor of 19th-century literature at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York.

• USA Today
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/07/30/book-review-incendiaries-r-o-kwon-debut-novel-abortion-religion-cults/841574002/
  Word count: 474

  Religious extremism makes debut novel 'The Incendiaries' burn with intensity
  Grace Li, USA TODAY Published 11:50 a.m. ET July 30, 2018 | Updated 12:21 p.m. ET July 30, 2018
  636682204180353737-The-Incendiaries---high-res.jpg
  (Photo: Riverhead)

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  "The Incendiaries" (Riverhead, 224 pp., ★★★½ out of four), R.O. Kwon's intense debut novel, burns with religious extremism.

  Inspired by her own falling out with Catholicism, Kwon weaves a story of a fictional Christian fundamentalist cult that bombs a New York abortion clinic on the very first page.

  She filters extremist ideals through three characters who are at the forefront or fringes of terrorism: John Leal (the leader), Phoebe (the disciple) and Will (the bystander). And it’s timely in an era when emotional fervor can spur on prejudice against certain communities or a controversial presidency.

  Kwon’s first narrator is Will, a college student who once used his Christian religion to cope with his mother’s illness, preaching in the streets until he saw the fissures in his own faith. But that's now in his past; Will no longer believes he was hand-picked by God.

  Will's girlfriend, Phoebe, is at the opposite side of the religious spectrum. Haunted by the death of her mother, Phoebe joins the Jejah, a Christian cult started by Leal, who discovered the dangerous power of faith after a harrowing experience in a North Korean gulag.

  Author R.O. Kwon.
  Author R.O. Kwon. (Photo: Smeeta Mahanti)

  As a member of the Jejah, Phoebe self-harms to be closer to God, participates in group confessions, and joins pro-life demonstrations.

  "The Incendiaries" is primarily character-driven, relying on fragmented memories relayed by Phoebe, Will and Leal leading up to the clinic bombing. This works because Kwon's trio is undeniably fascinating. She unpacks each person’s motivations, finding out how the cracks in their lives led them to fall in or out of love with religion.

  But despite acknowledging faith’s seductive power, Kwon never makes excuses for the Jejah’s actions.

  Sometimes her imagery is sparse, but when it hits, it strikes with lush beauty or ugliness, artfully revealing truths that Kwon’s characters may try to deny.

  For example, there’s no doubt that Will unhealthily romanticizes Phoebe. When he does, the imagery is dreamy to the point of obsession: “I kissed bitten nails that shine, in hindsight, like quartz, spoils I pulled down from the moon,” he says about Phoebe.

  Kwon’s novel is urgent in its timeliness, dizzyingly beautiful in its prose, and poignant in its discovery of three characters fractured by trauma, frantically trying to piece back together their lives.

  Follow Grace Z. Li on Twitter: @gracezhali

• Vox
  https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/3/17644166/incendiaries-r-o-kown-review
  Word count: 988

  In R.O. Kwon’s terrific new novel The Incendiaries, a cultist looks for meaning in tragedy
  Kwon’s debut is a shiningly ambitious look at how human beings try to fill the holes in their lives.
  By Constance Grady@constancegrady Aug 3, 2018, 10:00am EDT
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  Author photo courtesy of Smeeta Mahanti. Book cover courtesy of Riverhead Books.
  Early on in The Incendiaries, the shiningly ambitious debut novel from R.O. Kwon, piano student Phoebe comes to a great realization: She will never be a true artist, because she cannot escape from herself.

  “Playing had to be birthed in a place without ego, in which I didn’t exist except as the living conduit,” Phoebe says. But she concludes that such selfless artistry is beyond her, and for this reason, her music will always be mediocre.

  Or at least, that’s what we’re led to believe that Phoebe concludes. Each chapter of The Incendiaries is narrated in the voice of one of the book’s three main characters, and Phoebe’s epiphany comes in one of her chapters, delivered in her voice. But it eventually becomes clear that the only character we’re really hearing from is Will, Phoebe’s boyfriend. Phoebe’s chapters are just Will’s best attempt to ventriloquize Phoebe’s voice, to erase his ego and become Phoebe’s living conduit.

  That’s because in The Incendiaries, all the characters are trying to lose themselves, to dissolve their egos in the service of something greater: art, or love, or religion. But it’s not entirely clear that such a goal is truly worthwhile. Because when some of them actually succeed in surrendering themselves to what they believe to be a higher good, the results are catastrophic.

  Rating

  Will and Phoebe build their relationship in an attempt to fill the holes in their lives. It doesn’t work out.
  Phoebe and Will are both college students desperately searching for something to bring meaning and order to their lives in the wake of a loss. Phoebe has abandoned piano playing on the grounds that if she will never be great, there’s no point in continuing to work at it, and now her life feels empty; she’s also filled with grief and guilt over the death of her mother, for which she blames herself. Will is a former evangelical who has lost his religious faith, “at which point,” he says, “I’d had to give up a long-held plan to assign my life to God.”

  For both Will and Phoebe, their relationship feels like an opportunity to at last grab hold of the structure they’ve lost, to fill the hole left behind by music and God through their single-minded love for one another. But in Will’s backward-looking narration, there’s a hint of doom even to the heady early days of their relationship: It’s not really possible, The Incendiaries seems to suggest, for one person to become the single focus of another person’s life. And when Will tries to push the issue, he commits a horrific betrayal.

  When Will and Phoebe’s relationship begins to falter, there’s another project waiting in the wings in the personage of The Incendiaries’ enigmatic third main character, John Leal. Leal is the leader of a religious cult called the Jejah, and he wants Phoebe to be his latest recruit. For Phoebe, the Jejah seems to offer one last chance to find meaning and order in her life: She can finally lose herself in the way she was never able to do as a pianist or a girlfriend, by giving up her ego to the higher power that is John Leal.

  From the novel’s opening pages, we know that the Jejah will eventually blow up a building under Leal’s leadership, that Phoebe will be involved, and that Will won’t be. “This is where I start having trouble, Phoebe,” says Will in the first chapter. “Buildings fell. People died. You once told me I hadn’t even tried to understand. So, here I am, trying.”

  The book that follows is Will’s attempt to fully understand what happened, to lose himself in an effort to recreate Phoebe’s perspective, just as Phoebe and the other Jejah eventually lose themselves to Leal’s apocalyptic visions. The source of tension here isn’t the question of what will happen, because we know what’s coming; it’s why, and whether the reason is something that we and Will together have any chance at all of truly understanding.

  As Kwon weaves her way through this story of absences and omissions, her language stays sparse and stark. We are given the bare minimum of grounding in time and place: We know that we are in an American college town, sometime after the advent of emails and cellphones, but no national events or national figures are ever named, and the technology never gets specific enough to give us any concrete sense of when the story takes place. Will and Phoebe seem to float through a world defined by its lack of moorings, and that is part of what lends poignancy to their desperate search for something, anything, around which they might organize their lives.

  For Will, the organizing figure is Phoebe, and even after their relationship ends, he is still trying to give himself over to her in order to tell her story. But The Incendiaries refuses to reveal whether Will is truly successful, whether he is able to give us a sense of who Phoebe is beyond Will’s idea of her. This is a novel of ambiguity, one in which meaning is created around absence, and in such a world, there are no easy answers.

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