Holding Fire: A Love Story

by Elissa Wald

A stripper long obsessed with firemen meets the man who rescued her from a burning building as a child and begins a journey through a doomed marriage. 20,000 first printing.

300 pages, Hardcover

First published October 10, 2001

About the author

Elissa Wald is the author of MEETING THE MASTER (Grove Press) and HOLDING FIRE (Context Books). Her work has also been published in multiple journals and anthologies, including Beacon Best of 2001, Creative Nonfiction, The Barcelona Review, The Mammoth Book of Erotica, Nerve: Literate Smut, The Ex-Files: New Stories about Old Flames, and Brain, Child Magazine. She has also worked as a stripper, run away to join the circus, and lived on a Native American reservation. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

Courtesy: http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/e...

Reviews

[David Keaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to read this book as a sort of immersion therapy. Post-9/11 hero worship made me weary of firemen and their "We don't want to be heroes" version of totally wanting to be heroes (maybe you had to be there), so I thought this might help me recalibrate. Plus, we're getting so far from the events of that day that almost no one understands any ongoing annoyance with firefighter posturing (which was up there with cops for a minute or two), or the steep decline in the quality of their calendars. This book came out one month before 9/11 (or was it one month after?) and exactly one decade after the movie Backdraft, the Citizen Kane of firefighter movies, which is crazy when you think about it because this book will always be helplessly entwined with both. At least in my brain. Full disclosure: I've owned at least three copies of Backdraft, VHS and DVD, as I work through my issues with the volunteer fireman who used his siren and his Truck Nutz® to cut me off on the highway but absolutely did *not* even drive to a fire (I followed him). So you'd think this book would have been a bigger hit since it's an unabashed celebration of heroism and rugged Gillette ad "The Best a Man Can Get" swagger right after the world's spotlight was on that profession. But the author had other ideas here? For one, the drifting POV that spends time in the heads of these guys is devastatingly accurate, and takes the shine off their badges a bit. I say this from a non-firefighting position of authority, but as an expert on youngish, terrible men. Jake is particularly fascinating, especially his pathological obsessions with cutting other people's "lawns." The interiors (and lawns) of the other two guys, with their stew of simple-minded pleasures and increasing pettiness and PTSD (but probably not as much jealousy as in real-life?) are maybe more accurate, but certainly less interesting. You can imagine firefighters actually using their hard-fought but increasingly slippery tough-guy identities as excuses to be assholes outside of combating fires. And by "you" I mean "me." And this all heads towards an fairly straightforward conclusion that was much less melodramatic than I expected (hoped?) but certainly time well spent overall. A very readable novel, maybe too unusual to be a potboiler, but has some of those qualities (not a negative, but I might not know what that word means). The clearest parallel was probably to Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline, which I happened to read very recently, and even if the author surrogate didn't give these men the discipline (i.e. "spanking") I was hoping for (though she kinda did with Jake, literally), they certainly don't walk away totally unscathed.

[william · Rating 1 out of 5]

Deeply odd but interesting book that came out right after 9/11 from the author of Meeting the Master. It's based on the author's affair with Pat Brown, a hero. I wrote it up for Time Out who were understandably skittish that month in 2001.


Dedicated to the "last American heroes," Holding Fire: A Love Story,” is really about a shrill and needy stripper’s sexual exploits with two of New York’s bravest. The author apparently interviewed hundreds of firemen for this first novel, but those hundreds are shrunk down to three composites: Seamus, the chief who has an extramarital affair, Jonah, another hero with hustling and Viet Nam in his past, and Jake, a macho young thing confused by his homosexual yearnings. Alicia has affairs with the latter two, spicing the love with varieties of generic kink, but both men leave her. Alicia, described endlessly as variations on sexy and beautiful and young, never comes close to experiencing the bond the firefighters have together. The depth of her romantic liaisons offer a clue: “The girl was in kick ass shape; her body was almost as amazing as his.” The book should feature a bare-chested Fabio on the cover, sporting a fireman's helmet.
The novel is at its best when Alicia leaves the men alone and lets them do their job. The descriptions of firefighting are gripping and vivid, jarringly so when set beside the domestic drama of a clinging woman. Jonah comes off as a thoroughly fascinating all-American hero who embodies the popular perception of firemen: tough guys who want to help rather than hurt, and as a result of such a life’s mission have to watch their colleagues be hurt and killed on a regular basis.
Wald exalts the firemen as heroes and then muddies that truth by airing what amounts to dirty laundry. The book was published after September 11 and Jonah is based on a real hero who perished in the WTC. Rather than refer to Holding Fire as fiction, the author has insisted that she now intends for her book to be a tribute to the FDNY and that the character of Jonah "will live on through the book. And it will immortalize him." From what one gleans of the man Jonah was based on, immortalizing him and his brothers through such a thin, adolescent fantasy adds petty insult to unfathomable injury.