The Flames of Passion, and Their Smoldering Remains

Catherine McKenzie, Smoke

Elizabeth Martin awakens one Tuesday in September to the smell of smoke. A career wildland firefighter, she swings into well-programmed Emergency Mode; but her husband Ben reminds her she’s retired for the sake of their marriage, and needs to act like it. Naturally, Elizabeth ignores her husband and races headlong into danger. There she discovers this man-made disaster has joined the long list of things threatening her illusion of domestic bliss.

Across town, Mindy Mitchell tries to get her friends, the Coffee Boosters, to do something generous for the fire’s first victim. Once Elizabeth's best friend, Mindy fell out with her a year ago, and now follows a group of manipulative suburban harpies she dislikes but can’t leave. To her horror, Mindy learns her son Angus has fallen in with a similarly dysfunctional peer group. Worse, Angus’s group may be responsible for the fire that's one shifting wind away from overrunning their entire town.

Veteran author and Montreal attorney Catherine McKenzie writes about the ways people fail to communicate, and how far our intentions fall from our consequences. Elizabeth and Mindy face the Cooper Basin Fire from opposite directions, but both stand to lose everything. The symbolism is unsubtle, but effective. The solution lies one conversation away, if the women can overcome their differences and talk.

These two women each want what they think the other has. Deferential, conflict-averse Mindy admires Elizabeth's apparent confidence, while Elizabeth, childless approaching forty, admires Mindy’s domestic stability. Elizabeth and Ben have agreed to divorce before page one, but still sleep in the same bed. The reason for their estrangement develops incrementally throughout the book. Mindy, meanwhile, marches listlessly through married life without much talking to her husband or kids.

These women’s difficult domestic situations evolve for readers against the unfolding backdrop of the Cooper Basin Fire. After a hot, dry summer, conditions are perfect for a sudden flashover event in the grasslands surrounding the mid-size, touristy resort town of Nelson. McKenzie is resolutely vague on where Nelson exactly is. Elizabeth, originally from Ottawa, gives hints it might be in Canada, but evidence suggests it’s probably in Wyoming.

Catherine McKenzie

Nelson’s city fathers want desperately to contain the fire, not only to preserve their community, but to protect easy tourist dollars. Wait, wasn’t that the backstory of Peter Benchley’s Jaws? Yes it was, and much like there, McKenzie uses the contrast between human facades and natural disaster to explore how fragile society actually is. The beauty, art, and commerce Nelson’s leaders preserve, come at the price of sweeping injustice under the rug.

Reading this book, I feel torn in multiple directions. The three relationships which play centrally in this novel—Elizabeth’s marriage, Mindy’s family, and the women’s friendship—could all heal nicely if people just spoke to one another. And the forces they fight against, particularly Elizabeth’s boss in the county attorney’s office and Mindy’s bitchy friends in the Coffee Boosters, come across as venal villains recycled from postwar Hollywood screwball comedy.

Yet I read this book, cover to cover, in two sittings. Analyzing the individual pieces, they seem initially pretty low-stakes; why can’t everybody ignore their baggage and remember there’s a massive grass fire threatening their town? But that’s the grad-school writing workshops talking, where everything has to be somehow massive. This novel’s parts coalesce into something stronger, the battle being for what narrative the characters accept as real.

Because real life often appears low-stakes, doesn’t it? The individual moral compromises we make to maintain our relationships, do our jobs, and not be alone in the world?  Only when they come together, when we realize each individual compromise has contributed to a mountain, does life have the momentum we associate with drama. McKenzie has written a story we cannot analyze for its elements, which appear boring separately; we must consume the whole thing together.

Elizabeth doesn’t talk to Ben, nor Mindy to her family, nor the women to one another, because humans fall into patterns of avoidance. The most important topics in our lives are also the ones we most assiduously resist discussing, because the emotional resonance rings too hard. Instead, we fall into preordained patterns of work, domesticity, and meaningless friendship. Only when something threatens to burn it down to we change.

This book wouldn’t pass a postgraduate writers’ workshop. Having been trained to overanalyze my own work, I realize I’ve fallen into doing that to others. Yet reading its parts together, this novel has a much more complex, sophisticated texture than its individual parts. I’m glad I swallowed my reluctance and kept reading, because this novel proved much greater than I had any right to expect.