Signal Fires ( Shapiro)

Signal Fires
by Dani Shapiro (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a pandemic book club pick. It received a mixed reviews.

A car accident and its subsequent coverup affect the lives of a family of four -- and likely the family of the deceased -- as well as a family that doesn't even move into the neighborhood for years.

The book opens talking about all the possible future of Misty Zimmerman should see survive this night. I thought we'd see some of this. We did not. The girl who dies is pretty much an afterthought except for when (some characters believe) she extends her influence from the beyond, enamating from the tree under which she died.

The book then jumps to the 21st century. And then back to 1999, and 2010, and all over the place. I was curious if this book would work better as a linear narrative, not that I would read a copy of it should someone present me with one, but it sees like the structure and the feelings replaced the plot of the novel, as little of it as it was.

Biggest complaint among the club members is that not one of the characters were likable, least of all the fellow you weren't supposed to like, the only one always referenced by his last name, Shenkmen. The mothers in the book get short shrift. They get pushed aside pretty quickly without much to do.

Shenkman is not a great father, and it doesn't help that he doesn't know how to get through to Waldo, who appears to be on the spectrum, which may have been a result of the umbilical cord being wrapped about his neck during his delivery on his kitchen floor by Dr. Ben from across the street. Note that after his birth, the two families apparently never spoke to each other again despite living across from each other for a decade.

After Waldo runs away and gets rescued, Waldo explains about super galactic clusters. Rather than getting upset again, Shenkman has a change and calmly asks Waldo to tell him more about the super clusters. In any other novel, this would be a significant turning point. Instead, ten years later, Shenkman, suddenly a widower, is the one reaching out to Waldo (not that Waldo ever reached out to his dad), and Waldo is basically a little shit. If the point was too little, too late, something should've been said ten years earlier that Waldo was going to resent his father forever.

Instead, Waldo finds friendship in the man who delivered him, who is the same man who covered up a crime in 1985. He's not a particularly good man, especially when compared to Shenkman. Again, basically no one was found to be a likable person in this book.

It was interesting but there was much to it. Just a lot of jumping around, two off-screen deaths, and an affair that gets forgiven (offscreen) and leads to a confession at an AA meeting without any consequences. The one thing that everyone appreciated was that it did take the Covid shutdown into account in its timeline and it affected the characters. Needlessly inserting politics wasn't appreciated.

This was another book that I listened to (read by the author) and read concurrently. This may become a thing for me.

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