Because a Fire Was in My Head (Flyover Fiction) - Tapa dura

"Brave and old-fashioned, Stegner's supple use of language and precise evocation of period and place bring a literary intuitiveness to this inventive portrait of a scheming temptress, rendering with disarming psychological acuity Kate's warring self-serving and self-destructive tendencies. Kate is too egocentric to be a sympathetic heroine, yet through Stegner's masterful treatment, she does become a forceful, persuasive, and wholly mesmerizing character." Booklist "Stegner (Undertow;Fata Morgana ) follows the tragic arc of Kate Riley, whose lifetime of self-destructive behavior takes her from rural Canada to a seaside cottage in northern California with plenty of gloomy pit stops along the way. Born in 1931 in Netherfield, Saskatchewan, Kate is her daddy's little girl, but he dies of cancer when she is 10. Before she turns 18, Kate flees her egotistical mother and the cruel prairie life for Vancouver, where she gets pregnant, gives up her baby girl for adoption and attempts suicide. She marries the older, affluent hotel owner Gregor Vancleve and has a son with him, but when Gregor's "vigor" fades, Kate has quickie affairs until Gregor divorces her. Similar behavioral patterns haunt Kate's subsequent moves to Seattle, San Francisco and Monterey. Alluring and gorgeous, Kate manipulates and seduces to get by and manically obsesses over her health and weight. Kate's downward spiral is undoubtedly grim, but Stegner punctuates it with muted hints of redemption; the result is uncommonly satisfying." Publishers "Sometimes a character comes along that creates a confusion of feelings within the reader. Beautiful, ambitious, and self-centered young Kate Riley, the protagonist of this latest novel from Stegner, is one of those characters. Abused by her mother and abandoned after the death of her father, Kate is as lonely as the Canadian plains where she grows up. But she soon realizes her ticket out of town-her sexuality. After escaping the prairie, Kate tries to find her own self-worth in each man she encounters and winds up in one bad relationship after another-not to mention a series of children she doesn't love and discards once she feels they have served their usefulness. Unfortunately, there is very little to like about Kate, a woman who rejects anything that might provide emotional stability, instead gravitating toward bad choices and worse situations (reminding one of that classic heroine we love to hate, Madame Bovary). Who can say what made Kate the way she is-her upbringing, the repressive culture, depression?-but that's what makes this complex and emotional literary novel a compelling yet troubling experience. Recommended for larger public libraries". Library Journal -Kellie Gillespie, City of Mesa Lib., AZ "A novel fully realized on every level, "Because a Fire Was in My Head" is a provocative literary work of weight and luster. A risky, intermittently melodramatic tale, it casts light both on the timeless mysteries of the human psyche and on the paradoxes of a notoriously contrary epoch, namely, post-World War II North America... Stegner's bold and stunning novel reminds us that for all the transformations of the tactile world, the country of the spirit remains the same, impelling us to sing the song of being human, as Yeats writes, "Till time and times are done." LA Times Book Review " ... [a] stunning new novel ... The poetic detail of Stegner's sentences is reminiscent of the novels of John Updike. An old-fashioned wordsmith, Stegner isn't particularly interested in postmodern gimmickry, preferring to tell a good story."--International Herald Tribune, 5 May 2007

Kate Riley is not the sort of heroine we meet in most American novels. Self-centered, shape-shifting, driven from one man to another and one city to the next, she is all too real - but not at all the loyal and steady homebody of idealized womanhood. When we first encounter her, Kate (or Katherine, or Kate of the Prairie, or Katrina) is about to undergo exploratory brain surgery for a condition she herself has fabricated. Sobered by the gravity of the procedure, she commences a journey of memory that takes us back to the Saskatchewan village where she grew up and to the singular event that altered her forever and irrevocably set the course of her life. From her childhood, in which she was held captive to a mother gone mad, through her adult life, which unfolds as a mesmerizing sequence of men, abandoned children, and perpetual movement, Kate's story is one of desperation and remarkable invention, a strangely American tale, brilliantly narrated by one of our most original writers.