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With apologies to the author, I sincerely hope that Lifetime never makes a movie out of Lee Merrill Byrd's novel Riley's Fire. I know that the premise is just begging for a TV movie treatment, and with what I hear about what Hollywood types mean when they say they've "read" a book, they might entirely miss all that makes this novel a superb example of what literature can do when it's not trying to be cinematic.
Riley set the fire that burned 63 percent of his skin to a third-degree crisp, though Byrd spends almost no time on this most screen-pleasing of moments. And though we know there are times of great pain for the boy as he is "reconstructed" in a Galveston, TX, burn unit, Riley (as narrator) reports these episodes calmly and in the past tense. I suppose you could explain all this away as Byrd's reluctance to face the pain; her own sons were badly burned in a playhouse fire. But her unsentimental portrayals of Riley, his parents and the others in the hospital argue against this.
What matters to Byrd is the boy who remains beneath the burns, a once garrulous boy now hushed to a scorched whisper, a once emotive, sensitive boy who now wears his face like a soldier's mask, glad for the immolation of his softer self. "Now he was tougher than nails," Riley thinks the first time he sees his ruined face in a mirror, "like a dinosaur, like G.I. Joe, like the Bionic Man -- plastered all over with layers of shiny skin."
Through Riley's interior voice, Byrd has pulled off a fine bit of literary legerdemain, casually acknowledging the horrific spectacle while pulling our attention down to the boy beneath, seeing right through the burns with a kind of X-ray vision. (Riley's internal mythology is always that of a young boy's heroes and superheroes.) Riley's story is inspiring but never extravagant, lyrical but hard and real. In the end, we are left with only a dry, buried, most uncertain but nevertheless substantial and glowing hope that Riley's future will be a good one. Somehow, on the page, that is enough.
Riley's Fire
By Lee Merrill Byrd (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 261 pages, $19.95)
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