Trying to find home, love, and safety in a hell on earth

Author: By Jodi Daynard

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: C2

Section: Books

Those who favor fire
By Lauren Wolk. Random House. 374 pp. $24.95

In artful hands, the most unlikely fictional places will spring to life. And not only spring, but stay so true that afterward one's own world feels unnatural, like walking in shoes after a day on ice.

Belle Haven, the setting for Lauren Wolk's remarkable first novel, ``Those Who Favor Fire,'' is such a place. Gentle, nearly idyllic, Belle Haven nonetheless contains one memorable difference from the typical American town: a subterranean coal fire that's burned for nearly a decade. Hot spots send off curls of smoke; trees turn black and disappear; cold tap water scalds tongues; coffins in the graveyard sink ``a little deeper than they ought to be.'' The fire seems to be gradually consuming the town, licking its way from Belle Haven's wooded borders toward the populated core.

Set against this dramatic backdrop is the story of a community and its struggle to preserve a beloved way of life. There's Angela, a single mom and owner of the town's hub, Angela's Kitchen; Frank, proprietor of Frank's Gas 'n' Go, a one-man census bureau who tracks arrivals and departures with unfailing accuracy; Ian Spaulding, retired schoolteacher and proprietor of the defunct Spaulding campground. Finally, there's Joe and Rachel, who find each other before they've had a chance to find themselves.

While fantastical in its imagery, ``Those Who Favor Fire'' is not entirely unrealistic. Such coal mine fires actually exist, feeding on veins of coal and air, slowly annihilating the towns that suffer them. Interestingly, Lauren Wolk has expressed regret that she never personally visited such a town. And yet, such ``failure'' may have been fortuitous, since Belle Haven is real in a way that only a freely imagined place can be.

In one scene, Angela's boy, Rusty, and a friend, Mary Beth Sanderson, are playing catch in her backyard. Mrs. Sanderson watches contentedly from her kitchen window when she ``sees her tall, sweet, lovely girl start to sink right down into the ground, her face changing, dust coming up in a cloud around her, dust and smoke, heard her screaming now. Rusty grabbed at Mary Beth's hand, the hand all that was left showing, fingers stretched out taut like an exotic bloom.''

Such breath-catching descriptions are nearly supernatural in their eerie menace, recalling the tainted landscapes of H. P. Lovecraft or Shirley Jackson. But more than simply jangling our nerves, Belle Haven's fire sharpens them, just as it does Joe's and Rachel's.

Rachel grew up in Belle Haven and has returned from college after the sudden death of her parents. Joe has happened there by chance, fleeing a world of privilege and isolation, having traded in not just the Jaguar his father had given him for a beat-up RV, but also his real name, Christopher Barrows, for the simpler Joe. However different their backgrounds, Rachel and Joe will share one crucial experience: being stripped bare of everything they once valued, leaving only those vital things that cannot be surrendered without surrendering life itself.

Wolk has an instinctive respect for the sanctity of her characters, an intuitive understanding that in serious fiction plot must be always be subservient to character, never the other way around. Thus, while her coal fire is a dramatic narrative conceit, it never overwhelms the story of real people facing real decisions.

Indeed, the author describes emotional details with the same sharp accuracy as she does pyrogenic ones. Joe and his sister, Holly, reunited in San Francisco after years of enforced separation, have urgent things to tell each other. But they're in a Thai restaurant and so, between words, the pair exclaims in turns, ``Good God, that's hot,'' or ``Water just makes it worse.'' Pining back in Belle Haven, Rachel ``knew she should be glad for Joe and Holly both, but instead she felt cranky and spiteful. She wanted to sit in her kitchen and eat everything in her cupboards, jar by jar.'' In these and other details, ``Those Who Favor Fire'' captures human behavior at its most ingenuous.

Wolk has a gift for description. But even more impressive is her ability to describe change, which, as anyone who has tried it knows, is one of the writer's most difficult challenges. In ``Those Who Favor Fire,'' the pace of change is nearly flawless and utterly convincing: Joe begins as a spoiled East Coast rich kid, becomes a modest member of Belle Haven's community and finally, in the face of menace, a leader and man. Rachel begins life as a Miss Goody Two Shoes, becomes a rebellious orphan, then a woman capable of independence and love. In Wolk's fictional world, people and fire move and change together, like a couple in a rhythmic but deadly dance -- or a marathon, each vying for first place in a race toward self-actualization.

For all its brilliant realism, however, ``Those Who Favor Fire'' remains an unapologetically stylized novel. Its canvas is larger than life, like that of a Thomas Hart Benton painting. The risk of such stylization is that, predictably, something gets overdone, and certain aspects of ``Those Who Favor Fire'' are no exception. Angela, the struggling single parent, is too giving, too worthy of others' generosity. Ian Spaulding is too paternal in his tender generosity toward Joe and Rachel. And Rachel herself is gifted with one too many contemporary virtues: Not only is she fiercely independent from men but also financially self-sufficient, unabashedly sexual, and -- as if that all weren't enough -- at the forefront of community service.

But the hyperbolic goodness of Wolk's characters, Joe and Rachel's capacity for growth, inject an undaunted wholesomeness into the smoldering core of ``Those Who Favor Fire,'' a willful optimism that won't be tamped down -- any more than will the fire.

In the end, ``Those Who Favor Fire'' -- filled as it is with people staving off the wiles of nature, battling unfair odds -- reveals itself in some ways to be the archetypal American Pioneer story. The people of Belle Haven, like their earliest forbears, are survivors destined to reinvent themselves in a new place. Or, to recall an even earlier mythology -- they literally rise up from ashes. ``Those Who Favor Fire'' shepherds us along with them, toward the very brink where, alongside Joe and Rachel, we peer into the gaping maw, then turn back, changed.