Playing with Wildfire

Wowwwww. Painful and powerful. Furious and tender and oh so familiar to anyone living in the Western US. This is a novel only in the loosest sense—objectively speaking it’s a collection of vignettes, written in different voices, centering around one massive wildfire and its effects on a small Colorado town—but it’s damned cohesive, and effective, and beautiful.

Pritchett is an impressive writer, evoking a roller coaster of emotions in each short chapter. She starts off strong, with that horrific anxious tension of an approaching fire, and she gets it right: I really felt it from the first two pages. In subsequent chapters she gets the helpless rage, the numbness, humor, bitterness, loss, desire for connection, and even, in a couple of chapters written first-person from the perspective of loser piece-of-shits, lets us see and almost empathize with said losers. She has tremendous heart and compassion, much more than I do. (I will never forgive anyone who lights a campfire in dry conditions).

This is a smart book. Scientifically literate. Respectful of Indigenous perspectives. Well informed on fire behavior, ecology, suppression. Intelligent, well-read characters. But above all it’s a deeply human book. It’s also one I’m glad to have read in February: it would be much too stressful in May.