Rogers, Ben. The Flamer.  Pensacola, FL: Aqueous Books, 2012.  248 pages (paperback)—Ben Rogers’ prologue makes clear that the scope of The Flamer is relative to his protagonist Oby’s survival. Like another coming of age novel that hinges on a protagonist’s survival, To Kill a Mockingbird, the story leads to reflection. The novels assume different cultural implications, but no matter the differences, Rogers gets the coming of age novel right.

After Ms. Lee’s novel, reflection concerns societal justice. After Rogers’ novel, reflection regards solitude, itself, and how an individual full of potential, with a bent toward destruction, might be a member of society, let alone productive in it. Oby’s experience takes place in Nevada, a landscape that promotes isolation, but it could take place anyplace where ideas of destruction and production lack distinction. Though societal implications are not as immediate in Rogers’ novel, by the end, Oby realizes a distinction between destruction and production. The Flamer individualizes the distinction and directs readers to its prevalence in society.

The lack of distinction is clear when we meet the child Oby. His home burns, and he would rather add to the flames than help hose the fire out. His fascination with combustion is rewarded in fifth grade for “cooking napalm” for a science fair. At a family dinner out, Oby’s father scoffs at his goal of being a cook. But his father’s influence cannot distract Oby from the fires in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Oby meets Mr. Weisgard, who teaches him chemistry via controlled experimentation—by cooking. Before he teaches Oby the importance of pleasurable meals, he introduces Oby to sodium. Sodium, usually bonded to other elements, when isolated as an element is prime to react exothermically, changing to heat or light, by water. After Mr. Weisgard’s dramatic demonstration at school, Oby steals a wedge of sodium. At home, Oby’s delight with the element fizzles out, and because of a migraine, he neglects its potential. As he sleeps the sodium reacts to the water in air. His father’s panic and instinctive response of throwing water on the blaze only adds to the destruction; Oby’s home ‘burns’ again.

As Oby develops through his adolescence, he journeys through the forces and chaos of sexuality. At school, he resists urges of “frenching drinking fountains, dry humping lockers.”  Nearer home, his “friend by proximity” Kelly (a boy) kisses him. Oby accepts sexuality as part of his identity, as best as he is able to understand it. He also accepts that he’s “some kind of pyro,” and that “[s]omething needed happening.”  In his environment, Oby is primed to react.

Much to his relief, “[t]he air turned hot and dry. Afternoon thunderstorms sent more lightning to the ground than rain. Brushfires flared up, blackening mountainsides. Atoms that had been sagebrush and pine trees were reincarnated as smoke.”  With summer and change of activities, he has a chance.

Oby’s education with Mr. Weisgard not only involves cooking. He also learns the story of Alfred Nobel and how to shoot a muzzleloader. Mr. Weisgard helps Oby get an internship at the local quarry, where Oby believes he will “handle explosives with complete impunity.”  His summer is not all about explosives, however; his supervisor Teri requires him to drive, to place urinal biscuits in portable toilets, and perform manual labor as she introduces him to the happenings in the quarry.

Eventually, he meets the drillers, “[o]n an individual basis, the drillers were awkward. Quiet. Pathetic. As a pack they ruled the landscape.”  A driller, Jack, who’s history is tied to Teri’s, provides Oby with an example to recognize destruction and production within relationships.

Finally, Oby begins with the blasting squad as a chuck tender. Beyond personal fascination, he comprehends outcomes of his actions. In his first, if lowly position at the quarry, he is honored by detonating a “shot.” Oby ‘causes’ the explosion; it is not an accident and is not random: “suddenly the earth lifted in a wave, left to right along the bench, booming as it rose and falling back with a long, low rumble, followed by the crackle of raining rocks, and billowing above it all a fog of dust, tiny bits of earth awoken from thousand-year slumbers and set adrift.”  Oby is on his way to realization.

Overall Oby’s narrative, while chemical, is organic. While spending as much time with an adolescent protagonist as we’d like, readers appreciate actual physical elements and transitions, including cooking to labor in the quarry, that lead to truths of discovery. The novel ends in the same landscape of isolation, with Oby working at the Nevada Test Site, fittingly in line with a tradition of destruction. However, bombs and nuclear waste mean something different to an adult Oby who understands well to question the implications of destruction.

Jacob Elison

College of Southern Nevada