The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.
I admire what I’ve read of Dani Shapiro’s nonfiction, so I was excited to read her latest novel Signal Fires. Starting with a car accident that will have long-lasting repercussions for one (formerly happy, “normal”) suburban family, the plot jumps POV and the timeline (from the ‘70s to Y2K to COVID lockdowns and back again), and with further dramatic events coincidentally joining neighbours together across the years, Shapiro makes the point that we are all connected: like spiderwebs; like supergalaxies; like signal fires. There are many relatable and touching scenes set inside larger, dramatic storylines, and with characters who are mostly dissatisfied with the choices they’ve made in their lives, this is a narrative that weighed heavily on my heart as I read it. I believed everything Shapiro writes about families and how individual choices can have far-reaching consequences, but there were also some quasi-mystical underpinnings that, if Shapiro wanted me to take them literally, and I believe she did, my mind was resistant to them. As a straight storyline: totally readable. If I was looking for deeper meaning: not quite satisfied. I’d rate 3.5 stars and am rounding up because it did make me feel something. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He’d like to take this suspended moment — the new millennium already careening inexorably forward — and roll it back instead. Back, back through layers of time to a split second when things could have gone differently, if only they had known. There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.
I don’t want to say much about the plot (which did always hold my interest) but want to reiterate that, for me, Signal Fires was all about the mood: the things that were never talked about (but which found ways to express themselves anyway); the families that fractured; the children that hurt (even as adults). There’s something sad about the suburbs here — the big house brings money worries, a long commute back into the city, isolation from neighbours — and as the houses on the street flip owners over the years, the only constants are the big oak tree (whose history, increasingly, no one remembers) and the constellations coldly marching through their houses in the sky. It will take a pandemic — and forced isolation — for characters to remember not to take their interpersonal bonds for granted (but while COVID makes an appearance as an outer reality, this is not a pandemic novel). The family dynamics and drama worked for me, completely.
“Yeah,” Waldo says. He’s looking straight ahead, though not at anything in particular. “Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.”
And I don’t really want to call out the particulars of the “quasi-mystical underpinnings” other than to note that while I am open to the possibility for grace and karma and synchronicity in real life, I am resistant to such things being made manifest in an otherwise straightforward, reality-based novel. (Resistant enough that I may eventually downgrade this to three stars.) Overall, I did like this very much, and as I think that Dani Shapiro is an excellent writer, I would be pleased to read more of her work.
I'll share here the kind of mystical scene that I resisted. SPOILER: After feeling responsible for a girl's death when he was fifteen, Theo Wilf felt disconnected from his family (even the mother who adored him and begged him to come home to visit as an adult) and others (never having a long-term romantic relationship) and it took COVID lockdowns and seeing people losing their jobs for Theo to feel a sense of connection to and responsibility for others, opening the kitchen of his shuttered restaurant to provide meals for those who could and those who couldn't pay:
His phone rings. Forty minutes north, a long-dead girl is sending out lassos of light. She has been doing this for many years, but conditions have to be just so. He has to be ready. Now, she crosses time and space. She is bones in a graveyard. She is cellular matter. She lives within the inner rings of an ancient tree. Every part of her that did not vanish on that summer night loops around him in an embrace he feels only as unexpected purpose and well-being. Theo Wilf, he answers the call. And again. Theo Wilf.
I am 100% open to reading that our shared humanity connects us all together — like spiderwebs; like supergalaxies; like signal fires — but I couldn't help but resist the few times that Shapiro made the point that we are literally connected by these "lassos of light" in an otherwise straightforward, nonmagical storyline. (And as I have confessed to being open to all manner of flaky ideas in this blog, I need to stress that this is solely a literary complaint; yet, resist I did.)
