Author Dani Shapiro’s captivating novel, Signal Fires, is a work of fiction I would read again.
Before April 1985, life was just peachy-keen at the Wilf home on 18 Division Street, in Brooklyn. Dr. Benjamin Wilf and his darling wife Mimi lived in the same comfortable house for years. There, within security and privilege, they happily raised their two lovely kids, Sarah and Theo. In time, Theo would become a popular chef, in Brooklyn and Sarah a filmmaker, wife and mother in LA. Both paid intermittent visits home to see the folks.
Whatever else happened in their lives, one thing remained immutable. No one in the family mentioned that fateful evening in August 1985 when seventeen year old Sarah threw their mother’s car keys to her younger brother, Theo. Their joy ride ended when the car crashed into the great oak in front of the Wilf house. The accident killed Misty Zimmerman, Sarah’s friend, a passenger in the car. Of course, Misty was taken by ambulance to a hospital and of course, the Wilfs respectfully grieved Misty’s tragic death, an only child of a single mother. However, after that fateful day, nobody in the family spoke about the accident. Not even among themselves. And yet it was always there, a dark pall over all their lives.
The Shenkman’s, a new family across the road from the Wilfs, had their own issues. Their only son, eleven-year old Waldo (who incidentally Dr. Wilf delivered back in 1999) was an oddball. Ostracized by his school friends, Waldo was a bitter disappointment to his prosaic father who flew into a rage each time Waldo would sneak outside and use his tablet to examine the constellations in the star-studded night -sky. The boy was a wiz! Waldo could identify and name dozens of constellations. Father and son did not see eye to eye.
Late one night, Dr. Benjamin, now 74, noticed young Waldo star- gazing. They chatted a bit. And would become friends, soulmates of sorts, mitigating the gaps in one anthers’ lives. When Waldo runs away from his home, and Mimi Wilf goes missing from her residential clinic for Alzheimer’s, the lives of the families intersect. The past tumbles into the present, on a collision course with the future that no one could predict.
Alternating between six different time periods, Shapiro emphatically and ever so convincingly asserts, everything is connected. Nothing vanishes in time. Shapiro masterfully spelunks the depth of human emotions and mines the inner lives of two families inextricably bound to one another, each missing signals that would revive their lives and ease the burdens they keep carrying.
Heartbreaking and heartwarming, Signal Fires is much too good to read only once.
