Book Review : Joe Clifford - A Moth to Flame (2024)
Joe Clifford is the author of five novels featuring a heartbroken, grief-stricken protagonist named Jay Porter who constantly puts himself at risk for quasi-strangers, in order to make up for his brother Chris' death. They're some of the best fiction I've ever read for Dead End Follies albeit a little bleak and melancholic for mainstream audiences. I had lost track of Clifford career for several years after that (my last review of his work is from five years ago), so I was glad to learn a couple weeks ago that he's still at it.
His novel A Moth to Flame came out last winter and it might be his most commercially appealing effort to date?
A Moth to Flame is told in two timelines. One from 1991 recalling the mysterious death of Jessica Barrett and a contemporary one where Jessica's little sister Lydia is making a living as an assistant medical examiner while stil processing the grief of such a life-altering tragedy. One night where she is dispatched at the scene of another mysterious death, Lydia receives a voicemail from the victim claiming that she had information on Jessica's death. That voicemail reopens both the case and Lydia's traumas.
Grief as an Identity
Joe Clifford writes about grief. That's what he does best and how he reaches people's heart with his fiction and he does it better than most again in A Moth to Flame. His protagonist Lydia Barrett is a perpetual little sister, wandering in darkness and looking for a reassurance her parents were never able to provide for her. The only authority figures that brought her comfort and reassurance being Jessica until she was 11 years old, Lydia constructed herself in regards to that trauma. She became an expert of eath.
It feels unfair to compare Lydia to Jay Porter, who I identified with at a nanocellular level, she felt a little less alive in her pain. She was not a productively self-destructive as Jay and her cagey nature made her, in my opinion, a little too girl-next-door for my tastes. This is totally a stylistic decision and as a theoretical person, the way she expresses her grief is valid. But I don’t read to meet everyday people. I read to meet larger-than-life characters who tear through the fabric of my reality to show me a way to transcend it.
That said, Joe Clifford built a psychologically accurate portrait of a grief-stricken middle-aged woman and of the kind of life such crushing tragedy creates for someone. The kind of emotionally limited social circle is builds around a wounded psyche. Tragedy is a quite isolating ordeal and often, people who will gravitate around a tragedy stricken person will do for their own reasons and the support cast of A Moth to Flame brilliantly reflects that reality. Grief can become you if you let it.
Hollywoodian Metadrama
Another fun aspect of A Moth to Flame is the metadramatic family history of Lydia, with her manipulative, alcoholic mother and her big shot producer absentee that. Gloria kind of bugged me at the beginning, but Joe Clifford brilliantly unfolded the sources of her bitterness and brokenness in a way that made her feel real. The assumed, wink-wink melodrama reminded me of Hilary Davidson’s early novels. It strategically breathed color and relatability to a novel that would’ve been too bleak and melancholic otherwise.
Although I had figured out who Jess' killer was early in the novel, I enjoyed how Joe Clifford blurred his traces by involving everyone around Lydia in that life-altering event. It’s another psychologically accurate detail that low key makes this novel interesting. When a death happens in a social circle, not everyone is affected the same, but everyone is affected and I loved how the ghost of Jessica Barrett loomed larger and larger over the novel as it progressed along. Everyone’s grieving. Everyone's feeling guilt to a degree.
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As it is often the case with Joe Clifford's novels, A Moth to Flame stayed with me for some time after I was finished reading it. Its themes developed. Its finer details blossomed to proper size. It’s not my favorite thing he's written, but I’d argue it's his more accessible. If you feel like an intense, gripping and relatable summer read, I believe A Moth to Flame is for you. It's compulsively readable and it has this quality where you can put it down if needed. That it's not gonna swallow your life. You need books like that too.
