After Arson

This essay collection spans a lifetime’s worth of characters, settings, themes, and ways of organizing. It is, after all, a collection of Gary Fincke’s best work. Yet, for the variety of content covered, from coming-of-age to family to nuclear weapons to space exploration to mass shootings to rock attacks on cars to the author’s mother’s obsession with potato chips, this collection has a durable thread that ties them all together: the need to observe and record everything. Struggle and resilience. Fear and pleasure. Faith and despair. Love and loathing. All of those tensions are closely examined within the shadow cast by death. As Gary Fincke writes, “Somewhere, early every day, I think the acolyte of terror dreams our bodies as it decides the exact address for delight.” This “thinking,” in essay after essay, is brilliantly articulated in an ever-evolving, contemporary style. The metaphors are beautiful, the prose is clipped and clean, and the reader is constantly surprised by the connections Fincke draws like the one between his daughter and Charles Manson. A panorama of screams, another of hearts, another of headlights, all of them transformed into memoir. The subjects as varied as a four-part exploration of different kinds of hands, a meditation on terror and the fireworks American children know as Sparklers, and eulogies seeded by love of potato chips and crossword puzzles. Like the best essays, all of these “discover” in an intimate, personal way.