Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Title: Little Fires Everywhere
Author: Celeste Ng
Published: 2017
Type: Fiction
Pages: 338
To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.
In Brief:
Quick, enjoyable read – I wouldn’t call it particularly powerful or life-changing, but it’s certainly engaging and touches on some salient topics like race, class, and motherhood.
Rating: 3.5
Synopsis:
Little Fires Everywhere opens, predictably, with little fires everywhere. More specifically, they’re lit in each bedroom of a house that belongs to Bill and Elena Richardson, a wealthy white couple in Shaker Heights, a progressive suburb of Cleveland. It’s assumed that their rebellious youngest daughter, Izzy, set the fires – the book then moves back to recount how we got there.
It all starts when Mia Warren and her teenage daughter Pearl move to Shaker Heights, renting the Richardson’s spare duplex. Pearl becomes close with the three oldest Richardson children and spends much of her time at their home, while Izzy finds a kindred spirit in Mia. It’s important to mention that Mia and Pearl are black, and had lived up until now as nomads, floating between towns. Further, Mia is a single mother, an artist who works odd jobs including as a maid to the Richardsons. In other words, they Do Not Fit In.
Tensions between the two families begin to simmer. Things are brought to a head when Mia finds out that a friend of the Richardson’s plan on adopting a Chinese baby she knows was born to her friend, Bebe Chow. Bebe abandoned the child at a fire station out of desperation, but has since got her life together and wants her back. Enraged at Mia’s meddling, Elena Richardson begins to investigate Mia’s past, and unbury secrets of her own.
Where I’m At:
When reading this book, I spent a lot of time alone. My roommate was out of town, Ashan had left, and San Francisco was (is) very much in shut down. I forgot how much I enjoy it, how sacred my solitude is to me. It reminded me of being in the Caribbean, my little rituals I had then: boiling water and storing it in the fridge, reading on the porch with a smoothie and shakshuka, yoga with the fan full blast on my face. It’s not that different here. My body notices its own movements more when I’m alone — how I am with no one around to see me. I dance more — my toes automatically flicking into pointe, idly twirling while waiting for my tea. I prioritize the solitary things I like, but often defer in favor of being with others: reading, running, baking. There’s a steadiness, a comfort when I can retreat into my own mind without any of the usual anxiety clawing its way to the surface. My theme song has been “Leaning on Myself,” by Anna of the North.
I’ve been writing daily Isolation Journal prompts, and one stood out to me, which compared the shutdown to traveling alone: “One of the many things I find valuable about travel –particularly solo travel – is that it naturally deprives us of many of about daily comforts and crutches, which in turn makes us more attentive and attuned to what’s going on, externally and internally. Who am I exactly without my automatic coffee maker, reliable wifi, my community at home? Some deprivations are more drastic than others, but even the littles ones have something to teach us about ourselves (the lesson might be: ‘I love my coffee maker.’ Perfectly good lesson!).”
With all the similarities to solo travel and my time in the Caribbean, it felt pretty fitting that I read this book together and discussed it with a few friends from the Peace Corps.
Getting Into it:
The aspect I found most powerful about this book was its portrayal of motherhood. Perhaps this is ironic, given that I’m not a mother and have absolutely no interest in becoming one (at the very least for the foreseeable future). That said, the book was really anchored by its mothers: Mia, Elena, Bebe, and Lisa McCullough. All four were driven by a fierce love for their children, written about so eloquently and earnestly, in a way I really cannot really imagine but found compelling. It also (directly) asked the question: “What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?” In all the moments that these characters frustrated me, every time I rolled my eyes, Ng would gently remind me: I can’t understand. They did it for their children. And I’d think of my mother, the times she annoys me, too: Her love for me is unfathomable. It’s a delicate line, and I think Ng handled it in a way that was very deft and empathetic.
I feel a bit more ambivalent about the way this book talks about race. It’s quite subtle. It’s rarely mentioned that Mia and Pearl are black, and the only time racial issues are really talked about explicitly is during the custody battle over the Chinese baby. But it’s there throughout the book, sort of pulsing in the background.
Of course, in some ways this is accurate. I grew up in an affluent suburb, and as a white person, I hardly even thought about race for much of my childhood. Furthermore, Little Fires Everywhere takes place in the 90s, before Black Lives Matter and perhaps in a time when America thought herself Beyond Such Things. So I appreciate that, but I do wish that Ng embraced the issue just a little bit more head-on – if she really wanted to make a point about race (as she says she did in the epilogue), I think more directness would have been more effective. I can easily imagine someone reading this book and hardly recognizing that race is supposed to be an issue at all. Sometimes readers need to be led a bit more forcefully when it comes to such topics.
I also didn’t really like the characters in the book. Ng often seemed to tell, not show, the reader about them in a way I found irritating and lazy. Essentially, she would say things like “X character is like y because z thing happened to her.” I realize I’m being contradictory since I just said that leaders need to be led more, but in this case I wish she had allowed me to make the connection myself, rather than giving blatant explanations.
And then the characters themselves, even if you put aside the way they were described, were just annoying. Part of this is maybe because a lot of them are teenagers, and teenagers are inherently annoying – but then, I read this book at the same time as The Astonishing Color of After (my next post) and I found those teenagers deeply empathetic even while being deeply annoying. I didn’t really empathize with anyone in this book, even among the adults. In some way Elena Richardson was my favorite character even though she was definitely the most annoying, because I’ve definitely known people exactly like her (again, affluent suburb). Though it might also be because I know Reese Witherspoon plays her in the new Hulu show.
The last thing I’ll say is that the ending of the book felt like a soap opera, everything very dramatic and a bit overdone. That said, soap operas are fun and despite my complaints, so was this book. I’d recommend reading it on an airplane, as a worthwhile way to enjoyably pass the time, but don’t expect to gain too much.
