How to Set a Fire and Why

Jesse Ball

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times review March 26th 2016

Lucia Stanton is angry – at authority, society, and the inbuilt inequalities that prevent people from having that what is necessary and least. And she has every reason to rage at life; her mother is in a psychiatric inpatient unit and no longer recognises her, all she has of her father is a Zippo lighter and she and her aunt are squatting in an acquaintance’s garage with barely enough money to buy food.

But Lucia refuses to accept the role of victim, and lives by a code of honour that has four rules: Have Empathy. Don’t do things that you aren’t proud of. Don’t believe nonsense, it is better to get into trouble than be a robot that blindly follows instructions. There is no such thing as property and everybody has the right to that which they need to survive.

Following her expulsion from school for stabbing one of her classmates in the neck with a pencil, she begins How To Set a Fire and Why in an attempt to make sense of the world. Part diary, part political manifesto, Lucia describes life with her aunt, the first few weeks at her new school and the tentative friendships that she, despite herself, begins to form. It also details her induction into the Arson Club, an anarchic movement whose philosophy –that everything that cannot (or will not) be shared should be burned – seems a natural extension of her own and which she crystalises into the pamphlet from which the novel takes its name. At first this is purely an intellectual exercise but, as the final few things of value in her life and prospects for escape are stripped away, fire becomes the only way Lucia can see can to reclaim her life and start it anew.

The narrator’s intelligence and anger burn through every page of this heartbreaking and beautiful story and it comes as a surprise to learn the author is not a precocious young woman but a well-established writer in his late thirties: American poet and novelist Jesse Ball, whose hauntingly surreal tales have won him considerable acclaim, if not the recognition he perhaps deserves (I first discovered him last year when I reviewed his 13^th novel, the equally extraordinary A Cure for Suicide).  

Although he has been likened in style to Kafka, Beckett, Calvino and Wilde, Ball captures the voice of a teenage girl with such clarity that the first comparison I found myself making I found myself making when I reluctantly laid it down was to Beatrice Spark’s equally challenging portrait of troubled adolescence in Go Ask Alice. And whilst I suspect Lucia’s political sensibilities strongly mirror his own, they are not only authentically in character but also presented in such a way I found myself disconcertingly sympathetic to them. How To Set a Fire and Why is a challenging and extremely rewarding read, and I look forward to discovering the other treasures that undoubtedly lie hidden in Ball’s backlist.