LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE (2017)
By Celeste Ng
Random House, 308 pages.
★★★★★
Little Fires Everywhere was so much in demand that the waiting list was too long at my local library, I gave up, and moved on. I came across it on an old list and finally got my hands on it. By then I had forgotten why I wanted it in the first place. Now I know; what a book! I can see why author Celeste Ng was praised to the skies.
On the surface it’s about the collision of two unlikely families. Haute bourgeois Elena and Bill Richardson live in the tony Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights with their four children: high school senior “Lexie” (Alexandra); her jock brother Trip; Moody, the aptly named younger brother; and “Izzy” (Isabella). Lexie is 18 and siblings were popped out in highly regimented fashion, just like Shaker Heights. Two passages from the book establish the barriers for a novel set in 1995-96. The first is a prologue from a 1963 Cosmopolitan that dubbed Shaker Heights a Utopia; the second a thought from Elena: “Rules exist for a reason: if you followed them you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.” When you see material like this you immediately think, “uh-oh.”
The second family is that of peripatetic artist and single mother Mia Warren and her 15-year-old daughter Pearl. Mia is a rolling stone and has been since she was an art school dropout, though she remains a person who simply must create. Every six months or so, Mia and Pearl pack their few possessions into a VW Rabbit and move on–sometimes because they are low on money and sometimes because Mia needs to recharge her artistic batteries. That VW is occasionally their home, but they scrape by and, against all odds, Pearl is a brilliant kid who burns through AP classes. When they finally arrive in Ohio, Mia promises they’ll settle down there–another “uh-oh,” if I’ve heard one. It helps figure that out when the novel opens and closes with a conflagration.
Remember the Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Start the Fire?” In this book, everyone seems to start fires of some sort. Ng once lived in Shaker Heights, but the morally ambiguity of Little Fires Everywhere gives it verisimilitude. It is at once a love letter to Ng’s former home, a withering social critique of it, and a series of cross-cultural clashes. It's Lexus, Explorer, and Jeep versus one battered VW; invention versus reinvention; falling in line versus making your own rules; shopping at thrift shops because they are retro cool versus those who can’t afford to go to the mall; McMansions and rental units; and ethnic identity versus liberal make-believe. On the last score, Lexie has a Black boyfriend, but if his family is as Shaker Heights as Lexie’s, does that make her enlightened? Don’t expect simplistic answers in a book that also delves into who should have the right to an abandoned Chinese baby, who is taking advantage of whom, who is sincere and who isn’t, who is following their dreams and who is simply following, good lies and bad ones....
Pearl is a jewel, but I also really liked Izzy, a Doc Marten-wearing surly teen who knows she doesn’t fit but finds an unexpected bond. I also appreciated how Ng situated her tale amidst Jerry Springer scream fests and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky debacle via subtle references that neither dwell upon details nor moralize. (I admire writers who, in turn, respect readers enough to let them draw their own conclusions.) Ng ultimately challenges us to evaluate whether deceptions lie along a spectrum or are always indefensible. That’s not easy to answer given that a lot of people end up playing the parsing game. You will probably come away hating busybody Elena and worring about Lexie, but we can’t be sure who will turn out okay and who will be shattered.
I really admired how Ng negotiated the question of what makes a person free: their possessions, their essential nature, who they pretend to be, or who they want to be. A lot hinges on a challenge hurled by Mia in a different context, “What do you want to do about it?” Bill Clinton infamously dodged an uncomfortable query with the oily retort, “It depends on what the definition of is, is.” I think that Little Fires Everywhere wants us to answer Mia’s question with a more substantive comeback: it depends on what “it” means.
Rob Weir
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