I imagine the warm, butter-yellow glow of your house turn to a hot, crackling red.” Loss, envy and retribution play out in the scene. The narrator’s longing - and something more dangerous - is palpable, especially when the wife lights candles nestled among the fir boughs on the mantel: “I let myself imagine, for a moment, watching those boughs go up in flames while you all sleep tonight. Through the picture window, she tracks the husband’s dance moves, the wife’s loving touch, the teenaged daughter and the young son in matching plaids. In the opening pages of her debut novel, “ The Push,” Ashley Audrain indelibly implants her narrator in the reader’s mind as the woman sits in her car, watching a happy family at Christmastime.
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