(Suspect Thoughts Press) $16.95
Jennifer Natalya Fink's slim novel Burn is at once wildly imaginative, brilliantly incisive, and thoroughly disgusting. Her focus is tight: We're completely submerged in the domestic reveries of the narrator, Mrs. Sylvia Edelman, a 1950s widow and half-hearted Communist who maintains a greater affection for the fiery idealism of her youth than for the ideology that had first ignited it. Fink lures us deep into her character's head with a vivid, pulsating accumulation of colorful things. There are the red-tinted details: tomatoes, a bandana, red licorice, Communism (with its must-have interior accessory, a hammer-and-sickle clock). There are the liquids: perked coffee, sugary tea, urine, grape juice, Windex, blood. (I suppose blood is red, too--do I need a Venn diagram to sort all this out?) The piles of textured minutiae threaten to distract you from the plot itself.
But happily, the plot is driven by precisely this brand of bright, slippery distraction. Sylvia shamelessly indulges her materialism--an impulse more sensual than dialectical--just out of sight of her "Internationale"-singing neighbors. Determined to stay put in the colony her late husband helped build, she keeps busy by putting up precious little resistance to the sexual allure of a nearly mute boy (or is he a robot?) named Simon. Their first meeting is deviously auspicious ("He faced my tomato plants like they were a wall, pissing away on them.... His feet were firmly rooted behind my Big Boy Burpees, the kind the catalogue advertises as featuring a big steak-tomato flavor, robust ruby color, and a bush habit"), and soon Sylvia and Simon are chasing each other into a pantry. Meanwhile, Sylvia's "fellow travelers," spooked at the unmistakable signs of federal surveillance, are all jumping ship for shiny new suburbs like "Teaneck, or Great Neck, or some other goddamn neck." Their chaotic meetings and fretful discussions underscore the main action with continual background chatter.
The narrative traces the progression of Sylvia and Simon's unsettling relationship--pedophilic if the boy is indeed a boy, or just plain bizarre if you suspect, along with Sylvia, that he is a sophisticated intelligence-gathering machine planted by the CIA. Sylvia's narration doesn't provide much of a clue, especially when her observations are blurred by fantasy: "I closed my eyes, keeping the image of his perfect dirty feet in my head. This little piggy goes to market, but this one stays at home with Sylvie. I'll pull off your big toe, pop it in my front pocket, and keep it. It will come off gracefully, a grape tugged and eaten off the vine in one gesture."
Though something about Simon is certainly off, it's exquisitely impossible to distinguish between his true attributes and Sylvia's greedy interpretations. As the mismatched couple (half menopausal immigrant, half sour-lemon-scented male simulacrum) eats and talks and fucks, the lightning rod of their unusual love story gathers and focuses the big themes that course through the primordially messy novel, transforming the electric charge of abstraction into something tangible, accessible, and human.
