Setting the Lawn on Fire

by Mack Friedman

Book Overview

Setting the Lawn on Fire, the first novel by critically acclaimed writer Mack Friedman, trails its narrator through his obsessions with sex, drugs, art, and poison. Ivan, a young Jewish boy from Milwaukee, embarks on a journey of sexual discovery that leads him from Wisconsin to Alaska, Philadelphia, and Mexico through stints as a fishery worker, artist, and finally a hustler who learns to provide the blank canvas for other people's dreams...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299213404
• ISBN13: 9780299213404
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Coming-Of-Age

BOOK REVIEW Friedman, Mack, Setting the Lawn on Fire, Terrace Books, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2206. Amos Lassen and Literary Pride Coming of age is never an easy thing. Some of us managed to do it with style but the majority of us remember those years of moving into adulthood as really rough periods. Mack Friedman gives us a coming of age and a coming out story that is just a wonderful read. There are times you are rocking in laughter and there are times that you are bleary with tears as you read this short novel of 147 pages. We have had so many coming out stories that I approached this book with reluctance. I thought to myself, "Ho hum, another one". But I was so wrong and by the time I reached the third page I was so rapt that even a new episode of "Desperate Housewives" would not have caused me to put it down. Ivan, a young Jewish boy from Milwaukee, is our main character and his journey through life is a journey of self discovery. As he travels, and travel he does--Wisconsin, Alaska, Philadelphia, Mexico and stops in between--he learns more about himself at each place. And as he learns he tells us about his learning process. He spends time as a hustler, a factory worker, a student and an artist. We meet Ivan as he succumbs to the games of early childhood (you know those games!) and then watch him take off and speed through adolescence, saunter through young adulthood and swagger into a period as a hustler. Of course his self sacrifice to lust is perhaps the most interesting part of the book if a favorite part must be chosen. The final picture we get of Ivan is of a complete individual, "a full fledged sexual identity" and a representative of what the world of desire can cause a person to become. In fact, desire seems to permeate every page of the book. Likewise the book arouses the sensory perceptions as presented by Friedman in a beautiful and precise writing style. The significance of the title of the book--the reference to fire--can be felt on every page, And I do not mean "flaming", I mean hot, hot descriptions of a kid not only coming of age but coming to terms with the world around him. This is a an honest book that is straightforward and bold as well as quite an accomplishment for a fist novel. What impresses me the most about it is that it is humble, it is human, it is honest, and it is sublime. Some of you may think that I never give a book a bad review. To some degree that is true. If I don't like a book, I prefer not to review because if I do someone may buy it. I like to play it safe by reviewing books that I feel contribute something to our daily lives as gay people, Setting the Lawn on Fire not only does this but it also makes me want to ask when is Friedman's next book coming. Reading this book was kind of like having the salad before the rest of the meal. It made me hungry for more.

The Pay Off

Mack Friedman's novel is nearly an unqualified triumph, told from beginning to end in the sort of poetic language that reaches to amazing heights and plumbs the lower depths in the bargain. Shadows of great civilizations hang in the balance. It has a range and geographic sweep that puts other contemporary novels to shame, for our young hero Ivan, born to an unfortunate family in Wisconsin, travels the length and breadth of North America looking for the one thing he could never get from his traditional middle-class education, a sense of belonging. I was surprised and thrilled when Ivan decided to go to Alaska and work with his hands as a teen. As an American boy growing up in France, I devoured novels and comics set in Alaska, and Friedman seems to me to strike exactly the right balance for writing directly about space and time--the compressed and extended seasons of the north, the foreshortened days, the glorious months of summer. At conjuring up place, there's no one like him, and his Mexican and Pennsylvanian fearscapes are just as vivid. Where did he learn the patois of so many different kinds of people? You'll pick up the book and the dialogue alone will capture you. Yet Ivan's story, his ceaseless desire for connection, has its own emotional underpinnings that merge with the sexual. To quell his feelings of self-loathing, and due to extreme horniness, he becomes a hustler, first as a call boy, then in absurd concatenation he cleans your house or apartment wearing only a jockstrap. When he first goes on a call, to a client who's into "spontaneous incest," he's directed to go down on his "cousin" and we find out at that moment that never has he--well I can't give away any more spoilers, Friedman will track me down and break my bones, but needless to say it's a dramatic surprise twist that to me had the punch of say, the end of THE SIXTH SENSE. The lush life of Friedman's prose nearly conceals his knack for the pure storytelling power we all crave at heart. He knows how to spin us out and he knows how to reel us in. Ivan's peregrinations occur under the shadow of Jeffrey Dahmer, another confused Wisconsin boy with a score to settle against society, and Friedman cannily plays off Ivan's all American appeal against Dahmer's sociopathology, and the payoff is the way they seem gradually to bleed into each other, so that the artificial borders of so called "psychology" dissolve in a blur of sensation. The only thing that I didn't care for was the baroque treatment of Ivan's mom and dad, who are dispatched with the slick efficiency of a Lemony Snicket novel. Mom comes down with a withering virus that makes her last days resemble Margaret Hamilton melting under water, while Dad is almost absurdly "absent," as though to stress the emotional neediness of the young would be hustler. What happens to Mom and Dad shouldn't happen to a dog and of course, their fates impart to the material of SETTING THE LAWN ON FIRE a very 70s, Gothic feeling

GENIUS

I don't write reviews, and am rather embarrassed to be doing so. But the others here were crazy. Just this: this is among the best gay novels of the last 20 years. All you need to know: Beautiful, vital, new. I'm a writer and editor, and Mack has a very brilliant piece too in a book I am editing. I've never met him, though, and am incorruptable anyhow. Missing this book is your loss.

"Look at me. Take as much as you can"

Ivan, the main protagonist in Mack Friedman's first novel, isn't your usual confused and diffident gay teenager. Aching to be cut loose from his middle-class and somewhat conservative Jewish roots, Ivan begins to realize who and what he is at a very early age. Ivan is of course devastated when his archaeologist mother suddenly dies. When his father leaves to pursue his scientific research overseas, Ivan is largely left to his own devices. It is 1985 and Ivan's friendship with Jeremy shapes much of his adolescence and his bourgeoning attraction towards men. He even admits that he didn't know what he was becoming, "it was because I didn't think I was. I had a sense of it but my point of view was limited: it was skin-deep and the boys always had clothes on." An experience with his gymnastics teacher alters forever his prudish and hesitant views on sex, but it is the erotic images of boys in medical textbooks, that awakens Ivan to the first enthralls of self-pleasure, and he gradually becomes obsessed with these distilled images. Their influence over Ivan is undeniably powerful, his fascination with these boys largely affecting his ability to relate to men later in his journey. In his early twenties, Ivan travels to the island of Ketchikan, off the west coast of British Columbia to work as a day laborer in a fish factory. Here he meets a bunch of other like-minded young, sexually frustrated, drifter guys. Although he keeps his sexual orientation to himself, he soon develops a crush on a boy called Sean and begins to obsess over "his dark nippled and his torn boxers." In Sean, Ivan spies a kindred spirit, "our dead mothers, and our hug at the ferry," but Ivan is unable to form any real connection with Sean - perhaps because he's just too obsessed with the dream of finding the ideal man. Upon returning home, he tries to reconnect with his mother's memory through her scrap books and her possessions, but instead gets himself involved a number of compromising sexual situations, playing out his fantasies, as he searches for this strange and enigmatic boy of his youth who has slipped away. Perhaps the real lessons are to be learned in Philadelphia where Ivan becomes a hustler with an escort agency and ends up tricking with the City's mayor. These erotic encounters are no longer sexually rewarding for Ivan, in reality, they mask a reluctance and hesitancy. As though Ivan is desperately trying to retrieve his boyish innocence: "any boy will really do, as long as he resembles how I used to look and how I used to feel." Setting the Lawn on Fire is indeed a provocative and challenging study of the cyclical nature of desire and the sexual yearning of youth. Ivan journeys through a world of frantic sex from adolescence to early adulthood, the unusual sense of urgency always present. The confusion, the terror, and above all, the overwhelming aspirations of Ivan's are very much reflective of the gay everyman as he forges a path through the surreptitious

One Boy's Journey to Adulthood

The series of poetic, sexually-charged vignettes which make up this book create a very different picture of a young gay man from the typical coming out novel. However, the sense of extreme isolation remains, especially after the narrator Ivan is virtually abandoned by his parents. His already itinerant mother dies from a virus and his father leaves the country to pursue his scientific research. But Ivan chooses to isolate himself further by travelling to work in an Alaskan fish factory where he falls in love with a young man he shares a tent with. Ivan has a propensity for rejecting any prospects for a real connection in favour of pursuing the dream of the unattainable. Later, after Ivan moves back home, a young man propositions him in the locker room. But he leaves him in favour of trying to feel up a young Romanian basketball player he's cornered in a parking garage. There's a sense of danger here for the boy's safety as Ivan plays out his sexual fantasy, just as later on when he begins working as an escort we fear for Ivan's safety. The multifarious erotic encounters Ivan pursues turn out not to be for sexual fulfilment, but a desperate reclaiming of his boyhood self: "any boy will really do, as long as he resembles how I used to look, reminds me how I used to feel. I lost touch. You see. I shake myself away." Although Ivan is rapidly reaching the age of adulthood, there is a sense that his childhood has been lost or stolen. His pursuit to reclaim it is oftentimes disturbing like his obsession with medical textbook photographs of naked boys or the series killer who takes the body parts of his gay victims that lurks in the background of this story. While Friedman's beautifully written chronicle of this unique character's early life can at times become disjointed and confused, he has a stunning turn of phrase that oftentimes yields startling insights. After a hurried session with a john in his attic, Friedman describes how Ivan psychologically deals with the horror of the encounter in a very haunting way: "I replay the scene over and over until I sense him as vague spirit, bearing just the remnants of its form." This is a powerful insight into the way people can continuously conjure up events beyond their control in their own minds as a way of emotionally owning them. This provocative book is insightful, wryly funny, daring and a challenge that is really worth undertaking.