...the most remarkable achievement of this novel, is its narrative voice. It belongs to Lucia Stanton, the novel’s disaffected, Holden Caulfield-style young narrator and heroine. Lucia is a marvelous creation and the richness of her voice — its intelligence, its casual precision — is felt on the very first page ... What makes How to Set a Fire and Why so radical, though, isn’t its politics. At least within Ball’s career, the novel is radical because of how traditional — how voice- and character-driven — it all feels. (I mean that as a compliment.) To deeply inhabit a character’s perspective and voice, Ball suggests, can be its own form of rigorous experimentation.
One of the triumphs of the novel is the delicacy with which Ball opens his narrator’s smart-aleck voice just wide enough to admit a sincere measure of wonder and dread ... How to Set a Fire and Why has the mood of a thriller but the plot of a coming-of-age novel. Although Lucia’s efforts to join her local Arson Club, and later to get revenge on an evil landlord, give structure to the narrative, much of the novel is devoted to Lucia’s thoughts about morality and 'the false parade of garbage that characterizes modern life.' Ball calls himself a fabulist but he is also a deeply moral writer, with a fine sense of tragedy.
How to Set a Fire and Why is about as close to verisimilitude as Ball usually gets ... [it] journeys into new and fruitful territory for Ball — not entirely successfully. For while the voice of Lucia is funnier, sharper and more poetic than the deliberately flat and inexplicit prose of his previous books, and the American landscape he depicts is far more terrifying than any Kafkaesque prison, this novel gradually loses focus as it develops ... It may be Ball’s deliberate strategy to make us watch his story drift away into a fog of vague language, but it also fails to bring out what is most memorable about one of his most vivid and engaging characters, Lucia Stanton.
...while it’s true that the story of her rebellious youth is intensely predictable, it’s also extremely well done: swift, sharp-tongued and enlivened by cockeyed humor. Mr. Ball has proven his knack for surreal, experimental fictions; now he shows that he can inject energy into more familiar material as well.
In 14-year-old Lucia Stanton, the putative author of the book, Ball has created a voice that echoes the beloved narrators of J.D. Salinger and John Green ... This is perfect summer reading for cool kids of all ages. Move over, Holden.
How To Set A Fire And Why deliberately keeps Lucia at a distance from readers, and the result is that she sometimes feels more like a too-clever trope than a person ... Like any teenager, Lucia is searching for answers. But she doesn’t like to ask questions; instead, she acts. She doesn’t ask what happened to her mother, even for her readers’ benefit; she simply visits her every week. She doesn’t talk about her father, instead she keeps him in her pocket, in the form of his old Zippo that she can light on command and bring to life ... To Ball’s credit, Lucia at least subverts the angry young man trope by being female. But for all of the author’s earlier literary triumphs, keeping pace with Lucia is frustrating, especially when she seems to be laughing at readers’ attempts to do so.
Jesse Ball, in his sixth and best novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, creates a literary figure who stands as one of the great angst-ridden and misfit teenagers in contemporary American literature ... Ball constructs How to Set a Fire and Why in short chapters that rarely exceed a couple of pages. This segmented orchestration allows readers to fall into Lucia’s world, but it also prevents us from seeing too much of it. We can fade into Lucia’s life and see her struggling, but we are never in one scene long enough to truly get angry with her or to give up on her. Ball’s portrait of a helplessly reckless teenager is beautiful to behold.
Lucia burns through conventional wisdom, bureaucracy, and other forms of social and institutional manipulation like, well, fire. Even in the book’s darkest moments, her self-assured moxie is powerfully uplifting. Lucia does not spare anyone’s feelings, she is not polite, she speaks her mind, and when the situation calls for it she is brave.
The great pleasure of How to Set a Fire lies in keeping up with Lucia's challenging and amusing trains of thought, and in measuring the distance between her intelligence and your own. The book is a meditation on the idea of nothingness. But while Lucia may be a nihilist, you can't say she's unhappy about the pointlessness of it all. If anything, she burns extra bright.
