THIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE

A new memoir from Flynn, showing a writer who refuses to be bound by the conventions of form.

Much like his previous work, Flynn’s latest is a collage that mixes narrative, reflection, literary and film criticism, fiction, fantasy, and ruthless self-interrogation. That it works should surprise no one familiar with the author; he has an uncommonly nuanced voice and sensibility, and he holds little back. Flynn begins with his young daughter and a story he has told her “about a man who lived in the woods behind my grandmother’s house.” He quickly admits, “obviously there’s a lot I leave out of the stories I tell my daughter.” Here, that includes his own marital infidelity, the story of which comes framed (emotionally, at any rate) by a set of revelations about his mother, who burned down the family house when Flynn was 6 years old. The fallout of that event runs throughout like a vein of ore, casting everything that follows in its dancing light. “John Cassavetes once proposed,” writes the author, “that when a character can’t find his way home, that’s where the story begins.” Certainly, that’s the case here. Unraveling his past in a series of short prose fragments, jumping around in time, Flynn excavates his history from an angle, as if he can’t bear to look at it head-on. Yet, as the book progresses, the author reveals nearly everything, from his mother’s suicide to the slow build of his affair with a woman who lived 1,500 miles away. For Flynn, there is a line connecting these events, an attempt to exert some sort of chaotic control. “Maybe my mother set the fire to find that sense of control as well,” he writes about their shared sense of complicity. Memoir is a genre of complicity, a form that thrives on questions and filling in the gaps, especially when information is conjectural or scant. Flynn plunges headlong into such a territory, endowing his book with a palpable sense of risk.

A remarkable and daring work, a song of both family and self.