Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng - Race, Privilege, and Secrets in Shaker Heighs, Ohio - Entrepreneur Generations

Similar to Celeste Ng's magnificent Everything I Never Told You, one of my favorite novels ever, her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere begins with a tragedy. Rather than a death, however, it's a house fire, and the omnicient narrator lets us know who probably set the fire in those opening pages. The novel's plot weaves its way back and forth in time to let us know how and why this fire was set and, as expected, reveals that in addition to this big fire, there are, indeed, little fires burning everywhere in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where this novel is set.

Also similar to her first novel, Ng is interested in issues of race, and her immense strength as a writer is in illuminating the internal lives of her secretive characters. Everything I Never Told You takes place in 1977, whereas Little Fires Everywhere is set in 1997; this is important, because both novels would be much different in the era of cell phones, widespread internet use, and social media. Ng needs her characters to have, and to be able to keep, secrets.

Whereas Everything I Never Told You is largely, in my view, a gut-wrenchingly sad novel, Little Fires Everywhere -- while it has moments full of grief -- is a bit happier and more optimistic. As aforementioned, the setting is Shaker Heights, OH, a suburb outside Cleveland which was created by well-meaning white liberals to eliminate racial disparity. I was struck by the connections the novel has to Laura Lippman's Wilde Lake (my review here), which similarly satirizes Columbia, MD, a younger, but comparable, quasi-utopia. Like that novel, Ng is seeking to expose the decidedly not post-racial underbelly beneath the beautiful homes and planned interactions of Shaker Heights.

Her satire isn't mean-spirited. Even the woman whose house is burned down and who is probably is the antagonist of the novel, Mrs. Richardson, is drawn out in such layers that I often felt sympathy for her, even as she's making other characters' lives more miserable through her refusal to see gray, the product of her privilege and cultural assumptions. When she's not basking in the warm glow of her good deeds, Mrs. Richardson is the landlord to Mia, a quirky artist with a teenage daughter, and the novel focuses on how both families interact with each other: Richardson and her two sons and two daughters, all well-drawn and conflicted, and Mia and her daughter Pearl (hello, possible Scarlet Letter reference!), who have spent most of their lives moving from town to town for reasons that become clear later.

The fulcrum on which much of the novel's conflict pivots is Mei Ling Chow -- or Mirabelle McCullough, depending on which side you are on -- a 6-week old infant abandoned by her postpartum depression-suffering birth mother, Bebe Chow, and then unofficially adopted by the wealthy McCullough family, who had been trying to have a successful pregnancy for years. The McCulloughs Americanize Mei Ling's name, and their idea of bringing Chinese culture into their baby's life is choosing a panda bear over a brown bear when picking stuff animals and eating at a Chinese restaurant once a month.

In Little Fires Everywhere, Ng is interested in these issues of race and culture, and her satire of late-1990s small-town Ohio rings totally true to my midwestern ears. Today, "I don't see race" is a punchline, but it wasn't in 1997. How far have we come? Twenty years later, it seems that head-in-the-sand worldview has led us, in part, to today's Trumpian divisiveness.

And even though some of the characters have late-1990s worldviews that seem frozen in time, the trial that consumes the second half of the novel -- about whether theMcCulloughs or Bebe get to keep little Mei Ling / Mirabelle -- shows us we haven't come that far. There are no easy answers. Mrs. McCullough is certainly a bit clueless, but she's suffered several miscarriages and clearly loves and provides for the baby. And Bebe deserves a second chance. And this isn't just an Asian version of Losing Isaiah; characters must find their way through moral dilemmas throughout the novel: we see characters dealing with issues of surrogacy, abortion, immigration, language barriers, and interracial relationships. Indeed, there are little fires everywhere. Each of these characters are struggling to do the right thing, even when they think they know the right thing is clear-cut.

The appeal of Ng's characters is their authenticity, an effect created by Ng's thorough characterization throughout the novel. I particularly loved Mia's flashbacks, when even a minor character like the kindly neighbor who lets her borrow a camera when she's a child, or the famous photographer who takes her under her wing as a college student, are drawn with layers and pathos. All the characters are complex and appealing, and we're rooting for them to do the right thing, even when we're unsure exactly of what that is, just as they are. And all of the characters reveal much more to us, through the conversational omniscient narrator, than they reveal to the rest of the world. Ng's strength is being able to tell her story through these multiple perspectives, without relying on any sort of gimmick; she's just naturally weaving between characters, and she captures the internal struggles of nearly a dozen well-rounded, likable, dynamic figures in the novel.

In Everything I Never Told You, the mother puts all of her hopes and dreams into the doomed Lydia, perhaps at the expense of the other children in the family. In Little Fires Everywhere, motherhood is again a major motif, but the topic is developed more widely: Ng is examining what it takes to be a mother, both being a biological mother as well as being a mother chosen by a "daughter." Mia, for example, has a cordial but blocked relationship with her biological mother, but "chooses" the mother figures of Pauline Hawkins, the photographer, and her partner, and, to a lesser extent, her neighbor in San Francisco. Then, in Shaker Heights, in addition to Pearl, she takes on a maternal role to both Lizzy and Lexie Richardson at different points in the novel, and we see both of these "daughter" figures impacted, at times profoundly, by her influence. The entire novel is like this: examining women who are mothers, who act as mothers, or who want to be mothers, and the subsequent impact this all has on their daughters, biological or otherwise.

It took me a long time to get through the novel, partly because this 17th year of teaching has been so challenging, but hurtled through the last several hours on Audible this Thanksgiving break; the narrator was the engaging Jennifer Lim. The thought-provoking result of Little Fires Everywhere made me smile and tear up several times, and I'm now about ready to put Celeste Ng on my pantheon of favorite writers.

Sidenote: Celeste Ng also really nice. I was able to see her do a reading at The Ivy in September, and told her my plan to teach Everything I Never Told You to my sophomores later this year. She is widely accessible on her Twitter (@pronounced_ing).

Good for her with all her success lately, whether being on the Seth Meyers show or Reese Witherspoon optioning Little Fires Everywhere for a TV series (indeed, with its twists and turns, there definitely seem to be some connections between the novel and Big Little Lies, Witherspoon's HBO mini-series, and I could definitely see Reese playing Mrs. Richardson or Mia if she wanted to star).

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2iOAhL3 Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng - Race, Privilege, and Secrets in Shaker Heighs, Ohio - Entrepreneur Generations

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