Suburban Mores

~ Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng ~

This ambitious book tackles race, class and motherhood in an upscale Cleveland suburb.

Race: Shaker Heights, the Cleveland suburb where the book is set, is depicted as largely white with a couple of black families and a smattering of Asians. Race (it is said multiple times) is not an issue in Shaker Heights.

“I mean, we’re lucky. No one sees race here”. [says Lexie, one of the teenage Richardson children]

One of the wealthy white families adopts an abandoned infant of Chinese origin, but the birth mother reappears and wants her baby back. And of course, it turns out that community reactions are indeed filtered through the prism of race.

Class, or rather money: the residents of the suburb are the sort of people who epitomize the word ‘privilege’.

They dazzled her, these Richardsons: with their easy confidence, their clear sense of purpose. […] They knew important people: the mayor, the director of the Cleveland Clinic ….Even the younger Richardsons had it, this sureness in themselves. […] Mrs Richardson’s family, in fact, had lived in Shaker for three generations now — almost, Pearl learned, since the city had been founded.

Motherhood: the three mothers at the center of this book are fiercely conscious of their role, and one main theme is whether motherhood is defined by childbirth or child-rearing. Elena Richardson has four children and is smugly satisfied about her well-planned life despite some concerns about her rebellious youngest child Izzy. Mia Warren is the offbeat, subversively original artist who is fiercely protective of her only child Pearl. Mrs McCullough, desperate for children and unable to bear any herself, is the adoptive parent of May Ling, the foundling infant.

There is a fair amount of authorial deus ex machina to advance the plot. A minor character refuses to share private patient data with another, but then conveniently is called out of her office leaving that data easily accessible on her computer. Another woman is unable to bear children, but then her doppelganger just happens to turn up on an NYC subway; this double is conveniently young, able to bear children and desperate for money so that she can become a surrogate for the couple. Lexie, the casually brilliant student who watches TV all afternoon because she can whip out her homework in half an hour, needs Pearl to write her college essay to Yale for no apparent reason other than for the author to forge a connection between the two characters.

Celeste Ng is an author who likes to tell rather than show, and who does not trust the reader to draw their own conclusions. Every motivation of every character is laid out in excruciating detail.

Trip got bored easily, and seldom thought about girls once they were out of his sight. But he had never encountered a girl like Pearl before, who wasn’t embarrassed to be smart, who didn’t quite fit into the orderly world of Shaker Heights, whether she knew it or not.

And yet, despite the detailed insights into their thoughts, none of the characters are quite convincing. Mia Warren has a deep connection with her child Pearl, and spends her days working in the Richardson household to spy on Pearl’s interactions with the Richardson kids, but never notices that Pearl has a crush on one of the boys. Mrs McCullough is a flat, cardboard character whose only personality traits relate to childbearing and child-rearing. Elena Richardson is an uninvolved parent to her three oldest and overly critical of Izzy, but a major plot twist requires her to behave oddly forcefully to Mia. The children are better drawn, and their high school mileu seems realistic, but even so, their actions are sometimes startlingly out of tune with their apparent personalities.

There is little to say about the male characters, who are either ciphers (Mr Richardson) or less well developed than the girls and women.

The best section, I thought, was the custody hearing with the facts presented by one lawyer given a different slant by another. The issue here was really open to debate: is a baby better off with its own birth mother, however poor, or with loving wealthy parents of a different ethnicity?

The baby had been undernourished […]

(but the baby had refused to latch […])

[The mother] did not seek help from a psychologist or doctor. […]

(She should have, it is true. But she had no idea where to turn. Her English was middling at best..)

It was a neatly done summary of the arguments, showing the biases on each side without excessive commentary.

This novel takes on complex issues, but never quite hits its mark.

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng. Penguin, 2017