Philip Montgomery is a man who doesn't recognize his own wife, Joss. In fact, he’s detached from reality altogether. He got this way because of a head injury sustained during a fire in the house. His sudden incapacity leaves Joss adrift amid recrimination and anger, as the spark that caused this mess stems from adultery. Caught up in this homewrecking is precocious daughter Terpe (named for the Greek muse of music, Euterpe, whose name means "bringer of delight"), and an infant daughter, Geline. And then, there’s the contractor, Adam Werth, who is quite handy for Joss.
Image courtesy She Writes Press
All this dysfunction is packed into Richmond author Lenore Gay’s second novel, “Other Fires” (She Writes Press). The pandemic has constrained publicity tours for new books, though Gay and local bookstore Chop Suey managed a small release event last week with a card table in front of the shop and good weather. “It was wonderful to see friends, and we were quite pleased,” Gay says.
In the story, Philip Montgomery’s head trauma gives him a mental condition called Capgras delusion, a misidentification syndrome that causes someone to see another person who appears to resemble, for example, a wife, but the sufferer doesn’t think this person is really her. This “imposter syndrome” is rare, but it provided a springboard for Gay’s plot, which is replete with fires and dreams.
Author Lenore Gay (Photo by Sasha Gay Overstreet)
“I found [the delusion] intriguing,” explains Gay, a retired licensed professional counselor and for 30 years adjunct faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rehabilitation Counseling Department. “I’ve received emails from people who know of it. After deciding I wanted to use Capgras in the book, I started thinking about characters, pulled together the family.” The reader becomes acquainted with the associated complications through rotations in perspective from members of the mixed-up Montgomery family.
Further, we are introduced to the sorrows of young Werther — Adam Werther, that is, a hunky but troubled contractor who enters the Montgomery household to fix some things, and, well, let’s just say he does. Werther gets a standout line in the story; following the theft of his ramshackle vehicle he receives an insurance payment: “The whole world stank, but at least he’d get a driveable truck.”
We witness young Terpe’s negotiation of her grief after the fire in the Montgomery house and the injury to her adored father. She moves through classes at school as though in a trance.
“Looking at the blackboard became a way not to feel lost: The large map and big globe meant geography and history; the long tables lined up with microscopes were obvious. Quotes from Shakespeare or Keats on the blackboard meant English class, also her homeroom. Gym became the worst class, of course she recognized the gym, but refused to change clothes.”
Reading “Other Fires” you can find the answer to the question posed by Peggy Lee in that Weimar cabaret-style Leiber-Stoller song “Is That All There Is?” There’s more to the fire here than you recognize at first.
