A regular couple’s burning love
Monica Hesse uncovers how a troubled relationship literally set a community on fire
Book review American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Monica Hesse Liveright
The fires were big news, for a while. Accomack County, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, spent late 2012 and early 2013 under siege, enduring 86 arsons in five months’ time, most of them set in abandoned buildings. No one died. For a while, investigators wondered if they had a criminal mastermind on their hands, but when the firebugs were finally caught, they turned out to be two locals, an ordinary couple in a complicated kind of love that found extraordinary expression in late-night flames.
He confessed; she protested her innocence, not convincingly; both of them went to prison. In March 2013, Monica Hesse, a writer for the Washington Post and a novelist (Girl in the Blue Coat), travelled to Accomack County to cover the trials of Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick.
The lengthy feature story that resulted, Love and Fire, has now been expanded into American Fire, a brisk, captivating and expertly crafted reconstruction of a community living through a time of fear, confusion and danger.
What Hesse found at the end of her journey to the far side of the Chesapeake Bay was Trump country, though no one called it that then. Rural and mostly white, Accomack County was and is a close-knit community battered by a long economic decline.
Hesse’s book is grounded on three core convictions. First, arson, as crimes go, is really, really interesting. Second, a wave of unsolved crimes can have unexpected effects on the fabric of a community, not all of them negative. Finally, and most important to Hesse, love is strange.
How strange? Boy meets girl, boy proposes to girl on bended knee at the local roadhouse, boy and girl hit hard times, boy loses the ability to perform in bed, boy and girl drive a gold minivan around with their eyes peeled for unused, decaying buildings — of which the Eastern Shore has thousands, just sitting there, ready-made symbols of decline, oddly beautiful in their dereliction and oddly beautiful when set aflame.
By page 11, we know whodunit. And, we know what has been done. The trick of American Fire, handled by Hesse with wonderfully casual assurance, is that she doesn’t show us her firestarters starting any fires, not until very near the end of the book. Rather, she shows us Charlie and Tonya living the non-criminal half of their lives, the normal part, and she makes us care. Charlie tries to make ends meet doing auto-body work; Tonya opens a small clothing boutique in the office of Charlie’s shop. In one of the book’s best moments, Charlie and Tonya are sharing a Christmas Day meal at the Royal Farms gas station when they’re joined by a pair of police officers. They all know each other; everything in this book is relentlessly local. “Y’all must be busy, with all the fires going on,” says Charlie to the cops. It’s a banal scene, but given what we know and what we suspect by that point of the book, it’s also a small, delicious thrill.
Arson is an offence tailor-made for rural places full of old buildings, and Hesse also delivers a great book about fire. Hesse is interested in the way fire moves, the way it’s set and the way it’s fought but most of all in the power it has over the mind: why do we like to see things burn? By the time the culprits are caught, a squadron of arsonist profilers has descended on Accomack County, and their insights form some of the most interesting portions of the narrative.
The roads of Accomack County feel well-travelled; the houses feel lived-in; all of the people feel awfully familiar. There are echoes here of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but for all that book’s majesty and daring, something clinical and superior hovers over its prose; Hesse, using a similar reporting style, is not so ambitious or comprehensive. In the end, however, she may tell a much more human story.