Clad in a thin robe and her son’s sneakers, Elena Richardson stands on the lawn watching as every remnant of her perfectly planned life turns to ash. Her three children contemplatively observe as firemen extinguish the charred remains of their childhood home. Arranged in neat row on the hood of a car, they are acutely aware of the problematic fact that their youngest sibling is missing. With a rebellious streak and a penchant for trouble, there is little doubt in the Richardsons’ minds that the fire sprouted from their younger sister’s subversive inclinations. Why she set the fire that upended their lives and how this event will transform them thereafter is a mystery locked between the pages of Celeste Ng’s most recent novel.
Set in an affluent Cleveland suburb during the Bill Clinton era, Celeste Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, sets itself up broadly as a struggle between order and chaos—between forced perfection and unbounded creativity. Additional social themes such as feminism, race, classism, and liberal conceit comprise Ng’s portrait of suburban life; however, it is family, or more specifically, motherhood in all its nuances and imperfections, which drives Ng’s narrative. Fathers, in fact, fade unceremoniously into the background as Ng explores the various mother-daughter relationships speckled throughout her portrayal of midwestern suburbia. Packed full of domestic angels, both traditional and new, Little Fires Everywhere illustrates the emotional inheritances of family.
Elena Richardson is the quintessential suburban mother. A product of have-it-all feminism, Mrs. Richardson does, in fact, seem to have it all: a large home filled with children, a loving, successful husband, a solid community standing, and a stable, albeit trivial, journalism career
Mia Warren is the typical genius-as-artist. A nomadic photographer traveling from town to town in search of her next project, Mia has promised her teenage daughter that this time will be different. This time they will set down roots. For the first time in her life, her daughter Pearl settles into the idea of a conventional home and lasting friendships. Bewitched by the Richardson’s and their archetypal home, Pearl follows their lives “as if they were a TV show she was fanatical about” (44). But just as Pearl finds the home she’d only ever dreamt of with the Richardsons, Izzy finds “a kindred spirit, a similar subversive spark” and understanding within the chaotic folds of Mia’s avant-garde lifestyle.
As Mia and Elena bond with each other’s children, they find the delicate nature of their lives suddenly threatened by their distinct existential philosophies. While Mia is clearly wary of the Richardsons’ influence over her daughter, it is Elena who is most threatened by Mia’s blatant disregard for the order and rules she’s learned to follow with a worship-like fervor. When Mia’s portrait appears in the local art museum, Elena cannot help but dig deeper into this mysterious woman’s past, looking for the skeletons which might help her banish this unconventional force from her suburban dream-world. Magnifying the tension between these two women and sparking a heated debate between members of this otherwise peaceful midwestern community is the custody battle for Mirabelle McCullough/May Ling Chow.
A Chinese immigrant living in Cleveland, Bebe Chow finds herself pregnant and alone after being abandoned by the father of her unborn child. More than likely suffering from postpartum depression, Bebe is jobless, hopeless, and far from any semblance of support and understanding. Desperate, delirious, and unstable, she abandons her child in front of a fire station, a decision she comes to regret.
Linda McCullough, Elena’s best friend since childhood, is what Kate Chopin would describe as a Mother-Woman. Despite a natural disposition to nurture, and a deep-seated desire for children, Linda has failed to bring a single child to term. Harrowed by immeasurable losses, Linda finds her propensity for love and hope suddenly revivified by the promise of a child, a living breathing infant, abandoned in the depth of winter and placed into her aching arms.
Although more than a decade on the road has left Mia with “one rule: Don’t get attached. To any place…to anything. To anyone” (138), when she realizes that Mirabelle McCollough, the child Elena’s best friend is adopting, is none other than May Ling Chow, the regrettably abandoned child of Mia’s friendly coworker, Bebe Chow, something inside Mia changes. “Horrified” by “the idea that someone might take a mother’s child away” (139) she acts to reunite Bebe with May Ling.
Tugged by disparate loyalties, Mia and Elena find themselves pitted against each other as they join the Shaker Heights community in asking: “What [makes] someone a mother?” (297). As the novel progresses, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Ng’s final moral stance seems to suggest that life is made up of “ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right” (310). None of Ng’s mothers are a villain, but neither do they embody the traditional image of domestic perfection. Rather, Ng attempts to embody them with a greyscale realism particularly suitable to the current social climate.
The imperfection of Ng’s mothers is particularly highlighted by the effects they have on their daughters. Elena Richardson believes she can provide Izzy with a set of rules and guidelines to follow into a realm of safety and perfection, but what she ends up building is a cage for Izzy to rage against. Mia believes she can provide Pearl with a life distilled to only the essential and freedom to create her own path in life, but she denies Pearl the stability of a rooted family and home. Linda McCullough thinks she can give a Mirabelle all the privilege and possibility of her social position along with the depths of love she’s been forced to hide away in an infant-sized box, but she denies May Ling a link to her biological culture. Bebe Chow thinks she can give May Ling a connection to their shared past, but she threatens to lead Mirabelle into a life of extreme poverty. What all these women have in common i
Ng’s novel takes the widespread notion that morality is grey and pushes it into the formerly safe space of the domestic and suburban realm. While the home, physical or emotional, remains a space defined by love (in this case, the love between mothers and daughters) the cracks of this structure are brought unapologetically into the spotlight. Ultimately, the perceived perfection of America’s suburbia is cast as illusory. As such, Ng takes the contemporary idea of the fallen hero and transplants into the home. A clear attempt at realistic representation, her novel nonetheless retains a sense of hope. The myth of suburban perfection may be destabilized as the novel progresses, but faith in an adequate, yet undefined, replacement permeates the novel’s ending.
Fire is thus used not only as a symbol of destruction but also of rebirth. As Mia tells a distraught Izzy: “Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way. … Like after a prairie fire. … It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow” (340). An ever-persistent symbol, as the title of Little Fires Everywhere pointedly suggests, Ng’s fires represent the unavoidability of disaster. The plot of her novel centers on her characters’ ability to navigate the threats of this reality. Though it is certainly not a new idea, the idea of a cleansing fire is nonetheless effective as a metaphor for the various transformations her characters undergo.
Like her fictional mothers, Ng’s novel often strays from reaching perfection. There are times, for instance, when the use of fire as a literary device can feel heavy-handed and forced. Additionally, persistent foreshadowing removes weight from the revelations meant to engage the readers’ curiosity. Further, as mentioned earlier, Ng’s focus on the mother-daughter relationship renders masculine elements near invisible. Fathers function as absent providers and sons seems float past their mothers’ radars. Yet despite these narrative and stylistic flaws, Ng creates a captivating and socially relevant portrait of suburban life.
An international best-seller and top pick for Reese Witherspoon’s bookclub, Little Fires Everywhere has been buzzing just as loud as Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Ng is the daughter of a chemist and physicist who immigrated from Hong Kong to the US in the 60’s. Educated at Harvard and the University of Michigan, Ng grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her first novel won several awards and her second is being developed into a mini-series produced by Reese Witherspoon and Keri Washington on Hulu. Her talent for story-telling has won her widespread critical acclaim and with her debut novel in talks for a screen adaptation, her popularity, it seems, will only continue to rise.
As always, let me know what you think of Little Fires Everywhere. Do you feel that Celeste Ng’s novel lived up to all the hype? Feel free to leave a comment below and make sure to follow me on Instagram or Twitter for more book content.
Ng, Celeste. Little Fires Everywhere. ABACUS, 2017.
