In her bracing debut novel, “A Fire So Wild,” Sarah Ruiz-Grossman chronicles a community in Berkeley, California, on the brink of personal and environmental calamity as a wildfire threatens life as they know it.
The story follows a diverse cast, each character navigating his or her own private crises, be they marital, economic or existential.
Author Sarah Ruiz-Grossman.
(Courtesy of Chloé Suberville)
We open with Abigail, an out-of-touch affordable housing advocate nearing her 50th birthday, contemplating her career during a morning swim in Lake Anza. Abigail is feeling disillusioned by her life’s work when an idea sparks: She will turn her birthday party into a fund-raiser for a mixed-income housing project, hosting the event at her friend’s hillside mansion.
Next we meet Sunny and Willow, a homeless couple sleeping in a van parked on Berkeley’s shoreline. Working in construction, Sunny builds extravagant homes in the hills, all the while praying that he and Willow land a spot in the affordable housing units designated in a new high-rise (the very project Abigail is working on).
Meanwhile, Willow fatefully meets Abigail at a soup kitchen and is hired to cater Abigail’s fund-raiser. Then there is Abigail’s wife, Taylor, a start-up founder turned stay-at-home mother who is feeling “hollowed out” by her life and scheming to leave Abigail after her birthday.
Their teenage son, Xavier, suspects a rift between them, but avoids interfering. He, instead, focuses on the transfer student Mar, who’s grappling with a family issue of her own: Her parents, Gabriel and Camila, have separated.
Everybody is struggling in some way, and all the while, the wildfire looms.
Matters eventually escalate the night of the fund-raiser. While the party is under way, Berkeley residents receive emergency alerts warning them to evacuate. Those at the fund-raiser, including Abigail, Taylor and Willow, begin to scramble, but Xavier is down the street, having stealthily invited Mar to his house. They are alone and without cell service, ignorant of what is to come.
As the novel’s assorted cast races to escape the blaze, their lives become critically linked. Ruiz-Grossman balances the social and political, the emotional and physical, with insight and precision. Her disparate characters all hail from different worlds, and it’s a horrific thrill to witness their dramas unfurl and collide.
Through the juxtapositions they experience — like Sunny laboring over hilltop mansions, wondering if the wealthy homeowners will consider “the workers whose sweat had dripped into the slats of their wood floors, whose skin cells were embedded in their windowsills” — Ruiz-Grossman highlights gross economic disparity and the falsity of upward mobility.
At times, the novel’s political discourse can feel forced upon the narrative, resulting in moments of stilted dialogue and formulaic characters. Ruiz-Grossman’s writing is finest when she tackles the devastation of climate change. Even before the fire bursts onto the scene, her descriptions of the natural world are bewitching and distressing.
“The chalky rocks, wild tree roots and long grass that used to be hidden beneath the line of the water were all visible now,” Abigail thinks of a lake depleting under a severe drought. “They looked naked, exposed, like they hadn’t asked for any of this.”
Her prose is equally sharp and evocative when the fire finally does arrive: “A burnt-orange sky hung low, as though night had fallen and a hellish sun had risen in its place.”
There’s a second fire later in the novel, this time “not coming down from above, but sparked from below” as a few characters take radical action to send a message. It’s a satisfying punch that probes a question at the core of “A Fire So Wild”: When disaster strikes, whom does society rescue and whom does it abandon?
Book jacket for Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s “A Fire So Wild.”
(Courtesy of HarperCollins)
“A Fire So Wild” by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman (HarperCollins, 2024; 199 pages)
Maiuri, a Brooklyn novelist, wrote this review for The New York Times.