Book Report: Setting the Lawn On Fire

Setting the Lawn On Fire
By Mack Friedman

Book Description:
Setting the Lawn on Fire, the first novel by critically acclaimed writer Mack Friedman, trails its narrator through his obsessions with sex, drugs, art, and poison. Ivan, a young Jewish boy from Milwaukee, embarks on a journey of sexual discovery that leads him from Wisconsin to Alaska, Philadelphia, and Mexico through stints as a fishery worker, artist, and finally a hustler who learns to provide the blank canvas for other people’s dreams. The result is a new kind of coming-of-age story that sees passion from every angle because its protagonist is every kind of lover: the seducer and the seduced, the pornographer and the model, the hunter and the prey, the trick and the john. In the end, Setting the Lawn on Fire is also something rare—a fully realized, contemporary romance that illuminates the power of desire and the rituals of the body, the brain, and the heart that attempt to contain our passions.

First paragraph:
It's the first day of school, third grade. Where are you? Are you there? Do you remember the leaves starting to change, the breeze cooling hips under shorts? Were you looking down at your new shoes? I looked up on my way to the bus, saw a boy.

I bought this book because I thought the premise looked promising. I usually love solo-journeys of a man's self-discovery, and this looked quite interesting.

However, a month after having read it, I can not remember what it was about.

Ivan, the protag, summarizes his childhood with moments of sexual awkwardness, hinting to his future blossoming as a homosexual. His mother is physically absent (dying shortly in), and his dad is the absent mentally. Ivan deals with his confusing puberty by secretly nurturing his inappropriate fascinations: he sneaks into local libraries late at night and ferrets out reference books on male adolescence, then cuts out the pictures for his own private collection.

Then, the summer he turns twenty, Ivan moves to Alaska to work as a fisherman. He lives in a tent with a few other guys, working grueling, laborious jobs for minimum wage, often times going without work and just barely keeping themselves fed. The writing is fresh and descriptive, and the sights and smells were not hard to imagine.

But the events of this story are somewhat disjointed--or at least time has corroded my memory. Ivan's secret fetish is growing worse, and after he returns home he uses the gym locker room to pick up older men--and fails. Frustrated, he eventually places an add in the paper's back page, and is quickly contacted by a homosexual pimp, who immediately puts Ivan to work. But instead of living out his fantasies, Ivan's self-torment is only compounded and soon drugs enter the picture. The ending provides a quiet, heartbreaking moment of truth and realization in unexpected form, bringing this somewhat reckless and grandiose journey to a gentle close.

I wasn't expecting what I got, I'll say that much. This book is very liberal and unafraid, delving into one character's most private acts and thoughts, and then running with them to the end. But the writing is good--really good--and I have to admit the events on these pages are unique. Setting the Lawn On Fire is short and a quick read--which works really well for this particular story. A lot is crammed in between the covers, and, once I refreshed myself, I remembered exactly who Ivan was, the images I'd formed came trickling back one by one.

That's gotta say something.

Two and a half stars out of five