Little Fires Everywhere

Spoiler alert!

I can’t now remember (or find) the review or interview that made me want to read Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng. The Jody Picoult quote on the front cover should have clued me in to the type of book it is; I didn’t know, when I picked it up, that it was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, but I was expecting something more subversive, more challenging.

The story is of a middle-class white American family living in a planned community in Ohio, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of an artist single-mother, Mia, and her teenaged daughter, Pearl. The whole book felt very safe, very clean, and despite the plot strands around the custody battle over an abandoned (Asian) baby and a house blaze, it never felt like there was any real risk, any real danger.

According to the quotes printed at the front of the book, Francesca Brown, in Stylist magazine, called it “The Great American Novel we’ve been waiting for”, which is laughable hyperbole and ridiculously far off the mark. It’s closer to a potboiler, a very well written potboiler, and an enjoyable read, but a potboiler nonetheless.

There is no Lynchian underbelly to the planned community of Shaker Heights, no alcoholism, no drug abuse, no domestic violence or incest. When a teenage girl needs an abortion, she has access to a safe legal one at a local clinic untroubled by ‘pro-life’ protestors, and her biggest fear is that her mother will find out and be disappointed with her. We are reassured that the baby abandoned at a fire station in the middle of winter was never in any real risk of harm; when the house is set on fire, everyone is out and the family has insurance and another place to stay; Mia’s itinerant lifestyle makes her poor, but a safety-net means she is never at any risk of real impoverishment.

There are some good things here, especially the account of Mia’s development as an artist, from childhood experimentation to art school, although I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to how successful her art would be in real life.

Everyone in this book does the right thing, and only has the best intentions at heart; Mrs Richardson, the nearest thing the book has to a ‘villain’ is only really guilty of being a busy-body with a lack of imagination; she chose safety over adventure, but she is not trapped in a domestic hell, only dullness.

The plot is precision engineered, tab A always fitting perfectly into slot B, and everything is neatly wrapped up by the end of the book. I felt like I had read it before, and there probably isn’t a single element in it that hasn’t been covered elsewhere, and better – Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs covers the themes of race and adoption, and is far more complicated and ambiguous.