Book.
Religious Faith Turns Monstrous in R. O. Kwon’s “The Incendiaries”.
A début novel explores a violent cult and the comforts of belief.
In R. O. Kwon’s novel, a campus oddball emerges as a charismatic cult leader.
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 début 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 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.
he 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 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. ♦
Published in the print edition of the July 30, 2018, issue, with the headline “Accept the Mystery.”
Religious Faith Turns Monstrous in R. O. Kwon’s “The Incendiaries”.
A début novel explores a violent cult and the comforts of belief.
In R. O. Kwon’s novel, a campus oddball emerges as a charismatic cult leader.
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 début 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 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.
he 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 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. ♦
Published in the print edition of the July 30, 2018, issue, with the headline “Accept the Mystery.”
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