Like Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” it is also a political novel that examines the rationale for, and consequences of, terrorist acts - “the destruction of what is.” Kwon depicts controlled lives and warped convictions with great skill and intelligence.
“The Incendiaries” is a campus novel with a twist and a love story with a sting. In time, bombs go off and Phoebe goes missing, leaving Will to wonder if she is lost or on the run. What was previously a situation for Will is now a crisis. Will’s skepticism hardens into concern on learning that this select Christian organization with bizarre initiation rituals is, in fact, a sinister cult with North Korean connections. When former student John Leal arrives on the scene, barefoot and offering to overhaul her life, Phoebe shows signs of drifting again - not into his arms but into his Jejah group. The pair become an item: Will believes Phoebe to be the girl of his dreams Phoebe finds love-dazed Will “more child than man,” but he anchors her. She, like her creator, is Korean-American she is also incredibly popular, confident, experienced and reckless. He is an ex-Christian fundamentalist who waits tables at an outlying Italian restaurant to make ends meet. Will meets Phoebe in the first term at Edwards University. From a new, earlier beginning, she proceeds to chart events in which lurk answers, impulses and method behind later madness. With Will stunned and her reader intrigued, Kwon unspools. The short, arresting section concludes with confusion: Buildings fell and people died why, Will wonders, did Phoebe do it? Will, the novel’s narrator, describes a bomb blast and visualizes the perpetrators’ triumphant celebrations. Kwon’s “The Incendiaries” turns out to be its devastating endpoint.
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