Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng
Contributed by Darcey Schwenk
Context

Biography

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 1990s, and in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the setting for Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin). Her parents are scientists who arrived in the United States in 1968 (Lamy para. 16). Her father worked as a physicist for NASA and her mother was a research chemist (Laity para. 14). She got a degree from Harvard University and an MFA from the University of Michigan (Penguin). She currently lives with her husband and son in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Lamy para. 2).

Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, was a New York Times bestseller, as is Little Fires Everywhere. Everything I Never Told You is a winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award (Penguin). In 2014, Amazon chose Everything I Never Told You as its book of the year, and sales soared (Lamy para. 26). Little Fires Everywhere performed even better and is now a drama on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, and has been published in more than 30 languages (Penguin).

Ng has gained a reputation as an author who advances the careers of beginner writers, especially younger Asian American women. She promotes debut novels through blurbs and Twitter posts, the latter an important vehicle given the author’s 149,000 followers (Lamy paras. 10-12). In a 2010 essay titled “Why I Don’t Want to Be the Next Amy Tan,” Ng expressed her dismay at the phenomenon of a single Asian woman serving as the superstar representative of all writing talent in that group (Ng 2011).

Context

Little Fires Everywhere uses the time and place of 1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio as a lens to view some of the central issues that define American society. The suburb is in some ways a microcosm of the side of America that mainstream media often projects and many people perceive as the typical life in this country: mostly white, affluent, planned, and orderly. Through the eyes of Pearl, the brilliant daughter of artist Mia Warren, the reader sees the perfect world of the Richardson family, with their big house, important jobs, easy academic success, confidence, and good looks. As the story unfolds, a more nuanced reality emerges, and eventually the fissures that are present throughout American society appear in the Richardson family, and in the broader community of Shaker Heights.

For the astute reader, the narrator drops hints of the tensions that result on those fissures throughout the book, beginning with the title. When the story opens, the Richardson family home, which represents their apparently perfect life in Shaker Heights, is engulfed in flames. The fire appears to be intentional. Its cause is “little fires everywhere,” as reported by Lexie Richardson to her siblings and told to her by the firemen battling the flames. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant” (Ng, ch. 1).

The lives of the Richardsons are equally combustible, with the source of their accelerant being their own lack of self-awareness. When a friend of Mrs. Richardson refuses to return an adopted child to her birth mother, she runs to her side, certain that the material and social status of the family far outweighs the moral and cultural status of the birth mother, who is Chinese and not of status. Mr. Richardson joins in legal defense of the family as well. Mrs. Richardson, is pierced when her daughter Izzy calls her and her husband baby thieves, and decides to throw her favorite boots out as revenge. None of this, in her worldview as it has developed over the years, stops her from regarding herself as progressive.

It is their relationship with the Warrens, however, where the deepest revelations unfold. As Pearl Warren is dazzled by the material prosperity of the Richardsons and seduced by the benefits of conformity, her mother struggles to allow her child her first stable childhood experience after years on the road while keeping them clear of as many of the pitfalls of the material culture that stability allows into their lives. The conflict of values and the self-satisfied and unaware choices of the Richardsons lead the two families closer and closer into conflict until it is unavoidable, and every Richardson child, all of whom have grown attached to one or both of the Warrens, will have to make a choice between these two women and their status quo lifestyle.

Little Fires Everywhere reflects America’s actual image to a society that is often more comfortable with the version as advertised. It asks people who live comfortably in this country whether the cost of material success is too high and how to make that determination. Along the way, it leaves subtle hints for the careful reader, that plot a way of being in the world that is a little more humane, a little less superficial, and above all, more honest and self-aware.

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