Firelight

Firelight doesn’t begin with a cozy fire. Quite the opposite…it begins with boarding houses and window shopping. A mother and her boy are wandering around Seattle. They are smartly dressed and make a good impression but they haven’t got a dime…or hardly a dime anyway.

Window shopping is an art. The mother in this story excels at putting up a good front. That’s why she gets attentive service from store clerks even though she doesn’t buy anything. But Wolff raises the stakes and presents a more coherent vision since the character is window shopping not only for clothes and furniture but also for a place to live….window shopping for a whole life, really.

Mother and son visit an apartment, masquerading as usual, as prospective tenants for a place they can’t possibly afford. The man of the house shows them a large, beautiful room which contains a crackling fireplace, and in a lovely stroke, a counterpart to the boy in a girl who is reading by the fire.

I was stunned by Wolff’s next move, the window shoppers leave, never, of course, to return. They can’t afford the place. But the boy imagines a life history for the father and daughter that he has left behind…and imagines very plausibly too. But what I find delicious is that he can’t possibly guess right in this sense…that he can’t ever know if he was right or not.

Mother and son imagine a secure home, a home that they don’t have in their boarding house existence. They visit such a place and imagination leaps up another level as they imagine the lives of its real owners. It’s tricky having a first person child narrator who might seem too knowing. But Wolff solves this problem with elegance, by having his boy narrator grow up. Firelight concludes with another fire but colored by the imagination of the grown-up narrator. See for yourself. The craftmanship, the detailed insights of character that make the quality of Wolff’s stories comparable to Updike’s and Cheever’s are present in nearly every line.

-DH