Watching The Body Burn

by Thomas Glynn

In a magic-realism tale of a young man coming to terms with the confusion of his Catholic boyhood, "the Boy" rethinks and reinvents the terms of his youth, from his religious upbringing to his alcoholic father

Genres: Fiction

299 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 1989

About the author

American author of four novels (two of which were edited by Gordon Lish), a hybrid novel-cum-carpentry manual, and uncollected short stories.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A boy and his self-immolating father: Watching the Body Burn is not a dire warning on the dangers of smoking, but a series of vignettes concerning (mainly) a deranged father, but also a larger-than-life grandmother, strange uncles and other relatives, and wild incidents from childhood and youth. These are not sequential, but are collated from different time periods (the narrator’s age helpfully prefixing each chapter). Here’s the grandmother:

”I always thought she was made of iron...When she sat in a chair she looked like she was welded to it. Dust settled about her head and shoulders, tiny iron chips. When she talked I could hear her belly. She had weak arms and legs, like most old ladies, but she had a very powerful middle, like a C-47 cargo plane. When she spoke I thought of a Bessemer furnace, boiling and raging and spewing. Her words came through iron grates, along with showers of sparks.”

Father is crazy...and the son may be no better. Father is a man of extreme enthusiasms and inarticulate ideas. A man rejoicing in contradictions. He likes fishing, but doesn’t like catching fish. He likes having a cigarette, but doesn’t like smoking. His favourite trick is to imitate a sober man.

But do the vignettes add up to more than the sum of their parts? I’m not sure they do. For all their engaging diversity, there is a certain repetitiveness to them. A certain sameness that makes one peer too frequently at the page ends to see how far you’ve yet to go. So - to imitate the contrary father - I think I liked reading the book in parts, but didn’t like reading the book as a whole.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed Thomas Glynn's first novel, Temporary Sanity, but not to the degree that I would have sought out his other books. But then I saw this book mentioned in By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design and stumbled across it in a used bookstore a few days later, so I took that as a sign. I'm glad I picked this up.

I want to say that Watching the Body Burn is a coming of age story centered around a boy's relationship with his alcoholic, (probably) mentally ill father, who has set himself on fire, but that's really not the point of the book. The language is so present and vibrant that the story doesn't matter.

My father was a man of great enthusiams. Almost embarrassing enthusiasms. I don't think I was up to them. I may have contributed to their downfall. His theories were both simple and arcane, anomalies, things that despite their strangeness, and newness, one couldn't help feeling were wrong. What he needed was someone to sort and edit his theories, to show him where he went off the track, to gently, with kindly corrections, rerail him. And yet he delighted in his perversity, the "wrongness" of his theories. Sometimes, when he started to explain one, and then went into the ramifications, it must have been obvious, even to him, to his scientific mind, that he was wrong. But his enthusiasms carried him beyond "wrongness". He glided over them. This was a mere impediment to a grander course he was charting.

[Mike Polizzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad and hilarious, these manic vignettes resound and bounce off one another and grow into a portrait of an unhinged dipsomaniac pathologist as drawn by a son. The son's struggle is never directly voiced, instead it's written into the madcap logic and surreality of his world, the tiny fault lines of childhood mistakes and prejudices that grow into a fractured life. Glynn's description of the father kneeling face down in the bath, his description of the cigarette fire from which the novel draws it's name, of the game of golf as his father played it and the voice of Philip Morris will stick around for a while.

[roseaj · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the oddball way people are described throughout, but there's way too much fixation on peckers and pissing for me.