The arsonist

Sue Miller, 1943-

Large print - 2014

"Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for 15 years, Frankie Rowley has come home--home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or arson? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognize her father's slow failing and her mother's desperation, another house burns, and then another, always the homes of summer people. These frightening events, and the deep social fault lines that open in the town as a result, are observed and reported on by Bud Jacobs, a former political journalist, who has bought the local paper and moved to Pomeroy in an... attempt to find a kind of home himself. As this compelling book unfolds, as Bud and Frankie begin an unexpected, passionate affair, arson upends a trusting small community where people have never before bothered to lock their doors; and Frankie and Bud bring wholly different perspectives to the questions of who truly owns the land, who belongs in the town, and how, or even whether, newcomers can make a real home there" --

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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : Random House Large Print [2014]
Language
English
Main Author
Sue Miller, 1943- (-)
Edition
First large print edition
Physical Description
465 pages (large print) ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780804194556
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, a jet-lagged woman, unable to sleep, goes for a walk along a country road in the New England town where her family has summered for generations. Frankie Rowley, newly returned from years of relief work in Africa, is certainly lost in the middle of her life's journey, and in a dark night, if not precisely in a dark wood. Unsure of her place in the world, unsure whether she has a place in the world, Frankie has come to Pomeroy, N.H., for a life-reassessment disguised as a visit to her parents, who have decided to live full time in their summer house following her father's retirement from teaching. It's only after a car passes Frankie on the road, its headlights sweeping past in a disorienting arc, that she realizes the smell of smoke has been in the air for some time. Where there's smoke there are fires, and the town in Sue Miller's 10th novel, "The Arsonist," is suddenly full of them, with house after house going up in flames. All the affected houses, moreover, belong to "flatlanders" like Frankie's family, who occupy their older, larger homes during the summer, employ the locals to mow or clean and then return to their real lives in the fall, taking their money with them. Frankie, whose life in Africa included servants and a gated (guarded) expat community, is surely attuned to the conundrum of her family's place in Pomeroy. Her mother might insist that "class has no relevance to our lives. Your father is an intellectual," but the locals don't see it that way. And besides, an even more subtle divide is gradually coming into focus. Among the summer residents of her parents' generation - "poets, bishops, explorers of the human genome, presidents of this college or that" - Frankie's father, Alfie, barely registers. Despite the brand-name education (Hotchkiss and Harvard), the graduate degrees and tenure, his career has been obscure, and though he has never revealed it to his daughter, he is also a resentful social climber, a foster child and scholarship student plagued by "something a little wrong here and there" with his ties and shoes, a man who felt it necessary to "scramble to catch up" with those classmates blessed by money and luck. Alfie has also begun a slow decline into dementia, losing his way along the roads, forgetting things, wandering off. These diminishments and the unabated fires form parallel narrative lines, running alongside the story of Frankie and Bud Jacobs, a Washington journalist who has bought the local paper, as they cautiously begin a relationship. When the police concentrate on a suspect for the serial fire-setting, Bud and Frankie are unpersuaded, and both are burdened by their own suspicions about who might actually be responsible. Miller writes effectively about the tense underpinnings of a summer community, even (especially?) one that has endured a long history of such dualities. When Sylvia, Frankie's mother, gives a check for lawn care to a man with whom she had a long-ago summer romance, or when she castigates his employee, a reclusive teenager who lives in a trailer, it's not just the divide but the history of the divide that resonates. It falls to Pete, the retired editor from whom Bud has purchased The Pomeroy Union, to explain that tensions exist not from the separation of classes ("There was never the expectation that my parents would be invited, say, to a dinner party or anything like that. We knew our place") but from the 1960s incursion of college-educated farmers and carpenters, who brought with them "the idea that class differences weren't right, somehow." The blithe description of vacationing academics and professionals as summer "refugees" irks Frankie, who knows first-hand what real refugees have to endure, but she struggles with her own uprootedness and sudden choices. The novel itself, which is well underway before it discloses its temporal setting in the late 1990s (topics of discussion are the Lewinsky affair and the film "Titanic"), mirrors that quality of a floating interlude, untethered by time. This may be intentional, but it might also irritate readers hoping for a more concrete resolution of Frankie's conundrum, and of the arsonist's identity. "The Arsonist" is full of Miller's signature intelligence about people caught between moral responsibility and a hunger for self-realization, though, like its protagonist, it also feels ultimately unsettled, as if Frankie were still walking her dark country road in a constant, unresolved recalculation. JEAN HANFF KORELITZ is the author of five novels, most recently "You Should Have Known."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 22, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review

With her trademark elegant prose and masterful command of subtle psychological nuance, Miller explores the tensions between the summer people and the locals in a small New Hampshire town. Frankie Rowley, after years spent doing relief work abroad, has returned to her parents' summer home, unsure of whether she will ever go back to East Africa, feeling depleted by that region's seemingly endless suffering. But the reassuring comfort of the small town she has been coming to since she was a girl is shattered by a series of fires set by an arsonist who has targeted the rambling summer homes of the wealthy. Frankie falls into an unexpected and passionate love affair with the local newspaper editor while also becoming privy to her parents' difficulties, with her mother seeming to resent her husband's decline into Alzheimer's, especially since she no longer loves him. The town, awash in fear of the unknown arsonist, splits into factions aligned along class divisions. In this suspenseful and romantic novel, Miller delicately parses the value of commitment and community, the risky nature of relationships, and the yearning for meaningful work. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Miller's new novel has a first printing of 100,000, and her publisher is launching a full-throttle marketing campaign; no surprise for an author with more than 4 million copies of her books sold.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A small New Hampshire town provides the backdrop for Miller's (The Senator's Wife) provocative novel about the boundaries of relationships and the tenuous alliance between locals and summer residents when a crisis is at hand. After years of being an aid worker in Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the idyllic Pomeroy, N.H., summer home to which her parents have retired. But all is not well in Pomeroy, where a spate of house fires leaves everyone wary and afraid. Frankie, who may have seen the arsonist her first night home, contemplates her ambiguous future and falls for Bud Jacobs, a transplant who has traded the hustle and bustle of covering politics in D.C. for the security of smalltown life, buying the local newspaper. Meanwhile, Sylvia, Frankie's mother, becomes concerned about her husband's increasingly erratic behavior, fearful that it's a harbinger of Alzheimer's. Liz, Frankie's married sister, has her hands full dealing with their parents while Frankie's been overseas. Miller, a pro at explicating family relationships as well as the fragile underpinnings of mature romance, brilliantly draws parallels between Frankie's world in Africa and her life in New Hampshire, and explores how her characters define what "home" means to them and the lengths they will go to protect it. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Three separate themes share equal billing in this thoughtful, complex tale. An arsonist targets the properties of a New England community's part-time residents, while Frankie Rowley, newly returned from more than a decade abroad and searching for a new role in life, faces the complexities of her father's early Alzheimer's diagnosis. Miller (The Senator's Wife) presents a compelling and realistic view of the effect of Alzheimer's disease on a couple's marriage, the entire extended family, and the family's interactions with friends and neighbors. The author's calm, well-paced, expressive speech provides an enjoyable listening experience. VERDICT Will appeal to fans of the author and literary family stories. ["Miller works her usual storytelling magic, immersing her readers in the powerful cocktail of fear and uncertainty-whether that mixture cracks a once-tight community or threatens the human heart," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 6/12/14.]-Laurie Selwyn, formerly with Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

As a series of fires in a small New Hampshire town exposes tensions between summer and year-round residents, the members of one in-between family confront their own desires, limitations and capacities to love in Miller's latest (The Lake Shore Limited, 2010, etc.).Burned out on her transient life working for an NGO in Africa, Frankie takes a possibly permanent leave and comes to stay with her parents, Sylvia and Alfie, in Pomeroy, N.H., where they have recently retired after years of summering there. The night of Frankie's arrival coincides with the town's first house fire, which everyone assumes was an accident. Days later, at the annual Fourth of July tea, Frankie begins a flirtation with Bud, who runs Pomeroy's newspaper, and accompanies him to the site of the fire so he can take pictures. When a second fire occurs, again at a home belonging to summer residents, Bud begins to wonder if arson is involved. Soon there are more firesat least sixand Bud is actively covering the story. Frankie becomes more involved than she'd like after realizing she may have seen the arsonist's car the night of the first fire. Her description helps lead to an arrest. As the investigation meandersone of the least exciting detective stories everFrankie and Bud begin falling in love, though both are in their 40s and on different life paths. But the heart of the story really lies in Sylvia and Alfie's marriage. For years, seemingly super-competent Sylvia has been secretly dissatisfied with her marriage to self-important but only moderately successful college professor Alfie. Now Alfie's mind is failing and she's stuck caring for him. Miller's portrayal of early Alzheimer's and the toll it takes on a family is disturbingly accurate and avoids the sentimental uplift prevalent in issue-oriented fiction. Any spouse who has been there will recognize Sylvia's guilt, anger, protectiveness and helplessness as she watches Alfie deteriorate.While the melodrama fails to ignite, Miller captures all the complicated nuances of a family in crisis. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I Later, Frankie would remember the car speeding past in the dark as she stood at the edge of the old dirt road. She would remember that she had been aware of the smell of smoke for a while. Someone having a fire, she had assumed then, and that would turn out to be ­correct--­though not in the way she was imagining it. She had the quick thought, briefly entertained amid the other, rushing thoughts that were moving through her tired brain, that it was odd for someone to be doing this, having a fire this ­late--­or this ­early--­on an already warm summer night. But in the moment she ­didn't go beyond her quick assumption, her fleeting thought. She smelled the smoke, she saw the car approaching, and she got quickly out of the road, stepping first into the ditch that ran alongside it, and then, because it was night and she worried that the driver might not see her in the dark, onto the scrubby bank, pulling herself up between two trees that stood there. By the time she turned around to face the road again, the car had passed her. She stood for a moment watching as the wink of the red taillights disappeared behind a rise in the road, appeared again, dropped from sight, and appeared once more; and then was gone, the car's sound fading into nothing, into the rustle and odd croak of the night. She'd been walking for more than an hour by then, awash in memories and images of the life she'd just left behind. She'd waked, as she'd known she would, at about ­one-­thirty, and in her jet lag and confusion, she ­didn't know where she was, or even, for just a second or two, who she was. She'd felt this way only a few times before in her ­life--­in childhood ­mostly--­a disorientation so profound that it momentarily wiped her consciousness clean. It left her breathless now, too, her heart knocking hard in her chest as she lay there slowly feeling the room and her ­life--­her sense of being precisely herself, ­Frankie--­return and settle around her. It took her a few seconds longer than that, though, to understand why she might be here, in this room that meant summer, family. She lay still for a while, feeling her body grow calm again, taking in the familiar shapes in the dark around her. The clock next to her on the bedside table glowed ­greenly--­now 1:40, now 1:45. She turned on her back and stretched. She heard an animal screech somewhere far off and the tick of something shifting somewhere in the old house. Two o'clock. Okay, sleep ­wasn't going to come again for a while. She got up. She dressed in the dark, pulling on the same clothes she'd shed onto the floor five hours earlier when she'd come, exhausted, upstairs to bed. Carrying her shoes in her hand, she went into the black hall, found the stairs, then the smooth wooden handrail, and descended slowly, each step loudly protesting her weight, even though she tried to stay at their edges on the way down. The bright moonlight fell into the living room, clearly delineating the furniture. She could see the deep old slipcovered chairs hunkered companionably by the fireplace. This was where her parents sat on chilly nights, usually reading. The couch was turned ­toward the view of the mountains. Behind it, the globe of the earth with its obsolete borders and nations was bulbous in its wooden stand. The chest of drawers that held dress-ups and puzzles and ­games--­Monopoly and Clue, Parcheesi, ­Scrabble--­was a large dark block in the far corner of the room. She could hear her parents' twinned snoring from their bedroom in the new wing down the hall from the kitchen, the wing they'd built this past year because they were ­retiring--­retiring to this farmhouse they had used as a summer home for as long as Frankie could remember. She stood still and listened for a long moment. She thought she could distinguish one from another, her father's snores low and regular, the proverbial sawing of logs; her mother's more intermittent, more fluttery. She thought of their faces as they'd looked at the dining room table earlier tonight, both turned to her inquisitively, both seeming to ask to understand something of who she was now, both seeming to want something from her, something she could feel herself pulling against giving, as usual. She had a sense, suddenly, of how useless it was, that reflex. Probably they were just being polite. Probably the questions they were asking had been designed to keep the sense of a conversation going. Her resistance seemed to her now the residue of some childish impulse that had stayed with her into adulthood, the impulse to keep her life from them, not to let them own it. She sat down in one of the chairs by the fireplace. As she bent to pull on her shoes, the smell of old ashes rose ­toward her, and she felt flooded with a sense of ­nostalgia--­but a kind of aimless nostalgia. She ­couldn't locate its source. Nostalgia for this place? For something in her past here? Or, perhaps, lost to her, in her past elsewhere? She sat there for a long moment, swept by this formless, hungry feeling. Then she stood up, walked through the dining room, the kitchen, and came outside, setting the screen door of the little porch carefully, soundlessly, back into its wooden frame. The moon was bright here, bright on the mown grass around the house and the field beyond it, bright on the gravel driveway that led to the blackness of the trees at the driveway's end. The air was cool and smelled fresh after the ­closed-­in warmth of the house. The noise of the gravel under her shoes seemed explosively loud. When she got to the road, she turned left, away from town, and emerged from the dark well under the trees. The moon made a glowing white band of the road in front of her, made the woods on each side of the road read as more deeply black. As she walked, she was going over the steps that had brought her here the day before, a day that had gone on and on, that had lasted more than thirty-two hours as she traveled north and then west, across continents and oceans and time zones. She saw herself in Lamu, climbing down onto the old wooden ferry that plied the water between the island and the airport, holding the hand of the ­weather-­beaten, skinny ferryman as she stepped from the pier to the ­boat's edge, then to the ­built-­in bench that curved inside along its hull, a bench covered in fresh straw matting. There were assorted other travelers waiting to be helped on, too, including a few tourists and a fat woman wearing a buibui. She looked ancient, her heavy, sallow face deeply lined, but Frankie knew from experience in Africa that she might have been only a few years older than she herself was. The woman was carrying two live chickens, white and plump, held upside down. This seemed calming to them. They were quiet anyway, they jerked their heads back and forth, looking around with a mild disinterest at everything within their purview. The last to arrive were two younger women in head scarves. Once the boat had pushed off from the dock, once the ancient motor had caught and they were out on the choppy gray water, the girls pulled their scarves off, and the breeze lifted their thick dark hair. One of them closed her eyes and shook her head slowly in pleasure. During the short trip across the channel, Frankie watched the dhows heading out to sea or returning, the one belling lateen sail turned this way or that to catch the wind. She looked back at the stone town rising behind the dusty waterside quay. She'd stayed for just four days this time, alone in one of the tall town houses. She'd slept out on the rooftop under a lattice covered with jasmine and bougainvillea and waked before dawn each morning to the electronically amplified call to prayer, to the rich erotic smell of the jasmine. She'd walked the streets slowly, avoiding the open-water channel, the meandering donkeys. She looked into the open shops, she bought food and trinkets from the street vendors. She'd wanted to mark what she thought might be the end of her life in Africa, and this was a place she had particularly loved. On the other side of the wide channel, everyone disembarked in nearly perfect reverse order and walked up the sandy path to what constituted the ­airport--­a few ­thatched-­roof pavilions and huts where others were waiting, a short runway with a small plane parked on it. Everyone, including the chickens, got into this plane, each person having to lower her head when she passed through the narrow, low door hatch. As they flew, Frankie leaned against the window and watched the plane's winged shadow move across the steady ­brown and green of the savanna below. Occasionally they passed over a village with thatched roofs, or tin roofs winking in the sunlight, and Frankie could see the rising smoke from cooking fires and people standing in the cleared spaces of red dirt, looking up, shading their eyes. In Nairobi, she took a taxi home. She ­repacked her small bag quickly. Then she carried it, wheeling her larger bag, too, out to where the taxi driver waited at the gate by the guardhouse, talking in Kikuyu to Robert, the day guard. As the cab took her back to the airport, the sun set quickly, undramatically, equatorially: day, then night. The driver helped her into the chaos of the ­brightly lighted airport with her large bag, and she checked it through to Boston. Then there was the long wait in uncomfortable orange plastic chairs for the plane to Amsterdam, delayed for some reason or other, as planes in and out of Nairobi often were. It was almost midnight when she finally boarded and settled into her seat. A tall blond flight attendant with thick, almost clownish makeup came by with a warmed hand towel, then with a packet containing socks, a miniature toothbrush with a tube of toothpaste, and a sleep mask. Frankie had the sense of the beginning of different rules for life, different expectations. The note of improvisation was falling away, the developed world was beginning to encircle her. The sky outside the plane was dark, and she slept, a broken, uncomfortable sleep, alternately too hot and too cold and full of vivid, disturbing dreams she couldn't remember when she woke. The plane was squalid as they disembarked, blankets and pillows thrown on the floor along with trash, newspapers. She saw little empty nip bottles wedged into seat-back pockets here and there. In Amsterdam, where it was morning, the airport smelled of espresso, there were expensive ­first-­world goods for sale in the shops, there were people at computer stations and on cell phones, there was real ­luggage--­not boxes taped and tied, not old suitcases held together with ropes. Frankie had a ­two-­hour wait. She wandered in and out of the ­duty-­free shops for a while, though she ­didn't buy anything. She startled herself with her reflection in a mirror in front of a perfume shop. She stopped and stepped ­toward it. She ­didn't look particularly ­American--­a tall woman wearing a white blouse and khaki pants, her long wavy red hair pulled back, her pale face washed out without makeup. A missionary from Scotland, she thought. A dour anthropologist from the Netherlands. A very tired missionary or anthropologist. She went into a women's bathroom and washed her face with the ­odd-­smelling soap. She brushed her hair. She put on fresh eye makeup. She ­didn't look very different, but she felt better. On the flight to Boston, there was a movie, astonishing to Frankie in its stupidity and crudeness. Was this all right now in the States? Had she lived in Africa too long? She looked around at the others watching it with earphones in, watched as their faces changed in amusement. From time to time, she heard the ripples of light laughter sweep through the plane. The sun was bright as they came in for the landing in Boston. There were sailboats and motorboats on the ­dark blue water, their wakes making curling white lines behind them. There was the familiar urban skyline off in the distance and the closer village one across from the airport, the ­toylike ­old-­fashioned wooden houses seeming to look out benignly over the water at the boats and the airport activity. Frankie was struck, as she often was on the return to the States, particularly in good weather, at how pretty everything was, how ­fresh-looking, how clean. Tears rose to her eyes. The bus north to New Hampshire was loading up as she arrived at its bay. There were only twenty or so scattered passengers, so Frankie had a seat to herself. She fell into it with a great sense of relaxation and relief. The driver came on board and started the engine. The bus passed quickly through the streets around the station, and then they were on the highway. Frankie watched the sprawl around Boston fall away. She settled back for the long ride into a green that seemed vast and unused compared with Africa. She watched it rolling by, emptied, only occasionally a house, a farm, a gas station. She thought suddenly of Sam, one of her colleagues at the NGO she worked for. He had seen a photo of her family's country house once, with the overgrown, blooming meadows stretching out forever beyond it. "What crops are you raising here?" he had asked, pointing. When Frankie said, "Nothing," he shook his head in wonderment. "All that land and no farming." And here she was, she ­thought--­back where she belonged, in the prodigal Western world of no farming. Undeniably an American after all. She felt this in some pointed way, since, for the first time in the fifteen years she'd lived in Africa and come home to visit her family in the States, she ­didn't have a return ticket. She ­didn't know when she was going back. Or if she was. She leaned her head against the cool glass and dozed, then woke, then dozed again. The sun was getting lower in the afternoon sky when the bus pulled off the highway. They were approaching Winslow, and then they were there, at the little ­grocery-­store-­cum-­gas-­station that served as a bus stop. As they rounded the corner to the parking area behind it, Frankie saw several people waiting outside. It took her a few seconds to realize that one of ­them--­the old woman sitting alone on a bench in front of the big glass window under a faded sign that advertised Salada tea--­was her mother. Excerpted from The Arsonist by Sue Miller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.