Little Fires Everywhere
My job recently brought me to the outskirts of Cleveland – to suburban Solon, to charming (if cringingly named) Chagrin Falls, and to Shaker Heights, the setting of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. I bought the book at a LaGuardia airport kiosk, opened it over the Hudson, and was done by the time I touched back down in New York two days later.
Pulpy enough to be addictive, yet literary enough to be respectable, Little Fires Everywhere seems to be on everyone’s reading list this year. It’s book club catnip, adorns countless bookstore tables, and figures heavily in subway advertising on my morning commute. Reese Witherspoon even optioned it for a TV adaptation. The world loves Little Fires Everywhere, and I’m no different. This book – about the seismic impact the arrival of a nomadic mother-daughter pair has upon the picture-perfect Richardson family – is a near-perfect expression of Read + Roam’s ethos. It’s a novel in which the setting looms so large it’s practically a character of its own. And it’s a book that fundamentally changed my experience of that setting, imbuing a suburb I likely would have experienced as boring and banal with all sorts of rich and nuanced meaning.
Ng’s novel is set in her hometown in 1997, but opens with this quote from a 1963 issue of Cosmopolitan:
“Actually, though, all things considered, people from Shaker Heights are basically pretty much like people everywhere else in America. They may have three or four cars instead of one or two, and they may have two television sets instead of one, and when a Shaker Heights girl gets married she may have a reception for eight hundred, with the Meyer Davis band flown in from New York, instead of a wedding reception for a hundred with a local band, but these are all differences of degree rather than fundamental differences.”
This question, of degree versus fundamental difference, is at the heart of the book. Shaker Heights’ self-satisfied stability is the stage upon which the characters begin to examine the choices they’ve made, the boxes they find themselves in, and the ways they might have done things differently. In Shaker (as my clients so casually call it), a “right” way is presumed. That right way is responsible, accountable, and predictable – it paints its houses prescribed colors, keeps its grass shorter than six inches, and conforms to community expectations. But the arrival of Mia and Pearl shakes Shakers’ belief in towing the line, and everything changes for the book's characters. Elena taps into her long-repressed rage, Izzy sparks something she can’t take back, and even flat-as-a-pancake stock character Mr. Richardson loses his faith in the town’s promise of a more perfect world.
In my own life, I often wonder whether the decisions I’ve made place me at a degree of difference or a fundamental one from the world I grew up in. On its face, the distinctions between my world today and the Shaker of my childhood (albeit a less affluent, Canadian version) seem superficial. They’re in the car I don’t drive, the mortgage I don’t have, and the markers of adulthood I’ve stopped just short of. But Little Fires Everywhere seems to be asserting that these superficial differences do matter a great deal. Elena’s inner life finds external expression in her manicured lawn, her deep-pile carpet, and her shining car. Mia’s mind, conversely, is manifest in her austere apartment, her found-object photography, and her messy topknot. Ng scarcely needs to underscore how Elena has embraced convention and Mia flouted it – their surroundings do the talking for them.
As a kid, I was spellbound by those sort of suburban surroundings. I’d often tag along with my Mom on after-dinner walks around our subdivision, hoping to catch glimpses of the lives of our neighbors behind picture windows, moments caught in the amber of a television’s glow. Later, I moved to New York and grew interested in a different sort of life, the kind not framed by islands of grass. My suburban fascination faded. But over the course of several days reading Little Fires Everywhere, I found that fascination again. I craned my neck from the back of cabs as I passed one perfect-looking Shaker Heights home after another, newly curious about the lives contained within them. Ng has done for Shaker Heights what Jeffrey Eugenides did for Grosse Pointe with The Virgin Suicides and Rick Moody for New Canaan with The Ice Storm – she makes high school corridors, quiet cul-de-sacs, and basement rec rooms sizzle with angst and intrigue.
Beyond being a beautiful meditation on how places shape and define us, Little Fires Everywhere is also struck through with sharp and skillful sentences, ranging from funny (such as the docent who “looked as if all the juice had been sucked out of him through a straw via his pursed mouth.”) to terribly poignant. Perhaps my favorite bit of all was Mia’s observation of how difficult it is to pull away from growing children: “It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
Now that Little Fires Everywhere is done, all I want to do is consume more of Ng’s writing, core and all. Whatever suburb she finds herself in right now, I hope she’s perfectly framed in the golden light of a picture window, busily writing her next book.