View from a Burning Bridge by Sarah Goodyear

Originally published in Time Out New York, May 3, 2007

Though it’s set in a small Maine community, Sarah Goodyear’s debut novel, View from a Burning Bridge, is anything but quaint. After a Jayson Blair–esque journalism scandal ruins her career, Frances Treadwell flees to the woodsy town of Faith to start over. Soon, however, a meteorite crashes behind her house—and shatters her anonymity in the process. After the townspeople decide that the meteorite is in fact a UFO (and that Frances is in cahoots with alien invaders), it doesn’t take long before our heroine is back in the spotlight.

Quirky as it is, this plotline plays second fiddle to the strange encounters Frances has following the incident in her backyard. Against her better judgment, she gets involved with Greg, the unemployed, pot-smoking brother of her neighbor, Denise. Denise, in turn, develops an obsessive crush on Frances, inciting even more local gossip. Most peculiar is Thorsen Larson, a retired poet who befriends Frances in the hopes that she, with the use of a device called the “orgone accumulator,” can channel the energy generated through orgasms to better the world.

What does it all mean? View from a Burning Bridge isn’t saying, and the occasionally unpolished plot will surely inspire some head-scratching. But the book succeeds at developing a portrait of provincial strangeness. Goodyear, a TONYcontributor, especially excels when describing the colorful characters in Faith. Frances muses that a meteorite is “a rogue slice of universe, a chunk of randomness.” Similarly, Goodyear’s novel achieves a kind of beauty with its flair for the unexpected.