389. American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Monica Hesse
Genre: Nonfiction, Crime, Mystery
255 pages, published July 11, 2017
Reading Format: Book
Summary
Intrigued by a five-month arson spree across the rural coast of Virginia in Accomack County, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse decided to check out the scene. She discovered a compelling story of rural life in the age of Trump and the strange twists and turns that human nature can sometimes take.
Quotes
“This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”
“By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay. How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.”
“In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.”
“Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere.”
“Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s — Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Frank “Jelly” Nash — were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers — women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music — did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.
And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia.”
“It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin’ mystery.”
“The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love.”
“As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and pass it down to generations.”
“But maybe rural America isn’t dying so much as it’s Shucker-ing: adjusting, adapting, becoming something new, getting a new outdoor sign and adding jalapeno hush puppies to the menu. I’d like to think that.”
My Take
American Fire is a page turner. The primary reason for this is that Monica Hesse is a very talented writer. She takes a subject and characters that could be a bit boring and brings them to life. Even though you know who the arsonist is from the beginning of the book, you keep reading to find out why. Her insight into the depressed coastal region of Virginia, like many of the rural areas in the U.S., makes for compelling reading and gives the reader a clearer picture of the disparities in our country and the impact that is having.
