‘Meg’ Bites Back: Steve Alten vs. Richard Ellis

To the Editor:

I was puzzled by the choice of a reviewer for my book (Book Review, June 15). My book is entitled “Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California.” In the Introduction, I make it clear that fire is being used as a metaphor for the catastrophic events--like the Gold Rush and World War II--that have swept through California to alter the human and physical landscape. For the most part, I use the language of California writers--like Joan Didion and Luis Rodriguez and Amy Tan--to tell the story. The reviewer assigned the task of evaluating my book, Professor Stephen Pyne, is a historian of fire. Pyne’s investment in fire as an actual event left him disinclined to engage my book in the spirit with which it was written. Enlisting such an authority for such a task is a little like giving one of Kevin Starr’s “California Dream” books to a psychologist and then having him complain that Starr does not say enough about REM sleep or the workings of the unconscious.

David Wyatt, Charlottesville, Va.

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Stephen Pyne replies:

It was David Wyatt’s ill luck that “Five Fires” should be sent to a reviewer who has invested many years engaging fire as a phenomenon, a historical fact and a symbol. I take fire seriously. My criticism stems, however, from the author’s own insistence that style, metaphors and informing conceits matter, that their analysis is a way to understand the world and our experiences of it. I agree, and I tried to apply this standard to the author’s own work.

A fire metaphor at odds with fire has no power to inform. It still seems to me that real fires subvert Wyatt’s analysis in much the same way he described various California experiences subverting inherited genres. Had he used fire imagery as throwaway allusions here and there, I would have no concern. But fire as a structural conceit, which is how he defines its use, needs some bona fide referent. I couldn’t find any. And I’m reluctant to substitute “spirit” for analysis, which seems too much like smoke without flame.