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The Fires
By Alan Cheuse
Book Room Review
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Back Cover Summary
Finely-honed portraits of hope
and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the
intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on
separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan
makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish—to be
cremated—only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the
former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson begins
to make sense of his life when he retrieves his angry daughter from her
exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand
piano.
Book Room Review
The Fires is a compact book coming in at only 114 pages. But, it is rich with complexity and
symbolism, so it needs to be savored. The
first story, “In The Fires”, details a wife’s pain at the loss of her
husband. As the reader, you can feel her
raw emotions in Alan Cheuse’s writing.
For me, this first story was the stronger of the two stories largely
because I felt her loss so deeply. The
second story, “The Exorcism”, is also about pain resulting from a loss. Tom Swanson, the main character, must help
his daughter through her pain and deal with his own over the loss of his
ex-wife and his daughter’s mother. There is fire in each story, which in turn
cleanses each character’s pain. Both
stories are ultimately a depiction of how to overcome pain and not be consumed
by the fires of it.
Book Room Grade
B
Review Posted: June 12, 2008
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