The burning

An old black man reliving his whimsical past as a circus artist wire-dances on a tenement clothesline, high above the heads of a cheering crowd. Two white cops called in to "control the situation" try to talk him down. When one of them, surly and impatient, pulls a gun, the old man gives, pivots on the wire, slips, and plunges to his death. The crowd erupts. The city becomes a war zone. The cast of characters: Larry, a rookie cop who escapes the mob and finds refuge in an abandoned building, where he cowers, bleeding and terrified for his life. Arletha Mae, a fifteen-year-old black girl who has found redemption in the Gospel and her six-month-old baby, J.D., a death-tripping Vietnam vet tormented by visions of the war and the need for destruction. Ben, an unemployed engineer embittered by divorce and plagued by ambiguous feeling about his damaged ten-year-old son - a son who disappears into the heart of the violence. Together and apart, these vivid characters take the reader on a scorching "ship of fools" ride through twenty-four hours in the minefield of modern urban America.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.