Book review: ‘Nothing Left to Burn'

"Nothing Left to Burn" by Jay Varner, Algonquin, 304 pages, $23.95

In the stranger than fiction category of so-you-thought-your-family-was-weird, "Nothing Left to Burn" tells the story of a boy who spent his childhood neglected by his father, a volunteer firefighter, and terrified of his grandfather, a menacing fire bug suspected of torching his own homes and businesses.

On the surface, it’s a disturbing, emotionally revealing tale in which author Jay Varner gathers evidence of why these two men were haunted all their lives by a need to keep close company with the power of fire. But the real center of this uneasy narrative may be a mother’s smoldering resentment.

Though he now lives in Virginia, Varner grew up in central Pennsylvania. After college, he went to work for his hometown newspaper, assigned to the police and fire beat. Because of his appetite for fires and other accidents, he found himself revisiting his childhood, wondering if he’d inherited his father's and grandfather’s sickness.

The author says his original plan was to write his family’s story as fiction, but when a professor suggested he try a memoir, Varner scrapped the novel and went in search of some real answers. What he came up with falls somewhere between a family history and a Grimm’s fairy tale.

Varner portrays his paternal grandparents as grotesquely cartoonlike: Grandfather “Lucky” Varner is a grizzled, ogreish villain who bullies and harasses his son, daughter-in-law and grandson. His wife, Helen, is a fat slattern whose hugs leave her grandson stinking of “cheap perfume.”

Their collective sins are legion, from Helen offering stained baby clothes to the author’s mother when he was born, to Lucky’s weekly trip to the family’s backyard, where he burns salvage in hellish, out-of-control bonfires.

Jay’s father, Denton, comes across as a well-meaning but obsessive nut whose wife and child take a back seat to every emergency call crackling over his police scanner. According to his wife, Teena, Denton is “a good man” -- a true-blue fireman, faithful husband, even a passable father when he’s around.

But in his young son’s eyes, the fire department steals all Denton’s energy, and everything Jay yearns for in the way of father-son activities goes on the back burner. Dad promises to build a treehouse, teach him to ride a bike, have a squirt-gun fight and go hunting together. But he’s pathologically incapable of any follow-through and, even more oddly, often ends up doing these things alone.

Teena and her parents are the only reliable, caring members of the family. Yet, intentionally or not, the author’s portrait of his mother captures a discontented, angry, unsociable woman who blames her in-laws with a vengeance for her less than happy life.

Teena’s ways of “protecting” Jay are unnerving. She nixes the rare activities his father wants to include him in at the firehouse — “chicken and waffle breakfasts, Santa Claus’ annual Sunday afternoon visit” — telling Denton, “It’s not a place for kids.”

When Jay is 7 years old, she and her parents tell him his grandfather is an arsonist, “a sick man.” When Lucky gives his 8-year-old grandson a punching bag for his birthday, Teena offers to tape Lucky’s picture to it. “I know I’d rather punch something with his face on it.”