This is by Celeste Ng; it was published in 2017; and it's set in Ohio, towards the end of the 1990s (the Bill Clinton scandal acts as a kind of date stamp). My audio-version was very ably narrated by Jennifer Lim.

I enjoyed the listen, and felt the novel had some interesting things to say. But it didn't quite take off... I came to it via the (slightly reserved) recommendation here, and ended up similarly ambivalent.

Beware spoilers in what follows...

It's a busy first chapter. We open with a house on fire. The Richardsons' house. They're the archetypal successful family (Bill is a lawyer; Elena a small-time journalist; and they have four bright and articulate teenage children, and a very comfortable lifestyle). However, as the family discuss the crisis -- the blaze was caused deliberately, as is clear from the "little fires everywhere" -- the supposition is that it was started by the youngest of those privileged children, Izzy.

We also learn that the Richardsons' tenants (Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl), who have occupied a smaller place down the road, have returned their keys, and left.

And we hear that the community has been preoccupied lately by a case involving a baby, who seems to have two names: Mirabelle McCullough aka May Ling Chow.


The cover features the eight-part TV adaptation

The next chapter takes us back a year, and starts to trace the storylines that fed into this opening.

At times, this felt a little like a novel for young adults. There's lots about school kids, and which teachers they don't like, and who's sleeping with whom, and whether they are being responsible.

More interestingly, there's also an opportunity to see how they handle a yawning wealth gap. The affluent Richardsons, you see, are counterbalanced by Mia, a single mother who funds her passion for photography by working an array of basic jobs; sources their household goods from thrift shops; and uproots her daughter on a regular basis when she needs fresh inspiration for her art.

In these senses, it was a little reminiscent of Kristin Hannah's Night Road. But the characters here were much more interesting. The two contrasting mothers are the anchor points. Elena Richardson is the disappointed woman, whose career ambitions have been thwarted because her life has been absorbed by family. Frustration, it seems, has made her self-satisfied, judgemental, and nasty. She's particularly incapable of maintaining a sensible relationship with her younger daughter, Izzy (born prematurely, and therefore fussed over in a way that became claustrophobic and unendurable, and also a free spirit who's stifled by her cotton-wool environment). Mia, meanwhile, is the flamboyant woman, alight with artistic inspiration, and determined not to sell out commercially.

OK, so they're a just a teentsy bit stereotypical. But not unbearably so.


The action is set in Shaker Heights, a planned township that not only really exists, but was also the leafy but tightly regulated community where Ng grew up. "Appearances are 'carefully policed' and, Ng says, 'you are not to show anyone your messy side, ever'... The city, with its 'rule-oriented wholesome progressivism' had a strong sense of its own virtue and purpose. Elena Richardson is, in this sense, 'the human embodiment' of Shaker Heights"

Opposites attract, of course, so Elena's daughters end up feeling more comfortable with unconventional Mia, while Pearl relishes the stability and easy comforts of the Richardson home (where she befriends one son, Moody, and starts sleeping with the other, Trip -- honestly, the names...).

Aside from the contrast of privilege versus poverty, convention versus creativity, Ng explores some other important issues, all revolving around the theme of what it means to be a mother:

1. Surrogacy. Pearl is the product of a surrogate arrangement that Mia backed out of. Pearl "should" have had parents a bit like the Richardsons. Now she has Mia, who (depending on your viewpoint) offers a life of infinite variety, or selfishly drags her from pillar to post in search of her own creative spark.

2. Abortion. Lexie, the older Richardson daughter, accidentally gets pregnant, and decides she can't possibly go through with the whole teen-mother thing. Here, too, everyone will have his/her own opinion, but Ng gives us nothing more than Mia's gentle reminder that this is something Lexie will always have to carry with her.

3. Adoption. Bebe, a Chinese immigrant co-worker of Mia's, gives birth to a daughter, but -- gripped in a truly terrifying vice of poverty and depression -- abandons her at a fire station. The child is delivered into the care of Linda McCullough, a friend of Elena's, who has long yearned for a baby, but been unable to conceive. When Bebe, now in a better place, wants her baby back, the resulting custody battle pits affluence and stability against natural maternal rights and cultural considerations (do white people have the right to take adopted children out of the societies and networks they naturally belong in?).


The housing community where we resided in Yogyakarta, 2013-14. There were rules here, too, but by and large it was a relaxed, happy place

I often found myself perplexed by the legal issues in this novel. OK, it's the 1990s. So there was possibly less surveillance. But could Mia really have gone to ground so easily after breaking her surrogacy agreement? Could Elena -- who starts to dislike Mia (ostensibly because of her unconventional lifestyle, and her support for the immigrant in the custody case, but probably also because of the influence she's acquiring over her family) -- really have been able to dig up so much personal information about her tenant? Would that trial really have found in favour of the white couple as opposed to the birth mother? I'm not sure, and I suppose it doesn't really matter. But I guess it's better if such authenticity questions DON'T arise in the reader's mind.

I'll skip very quickly over the nitty-gritty of the rest of the plot: Elena finds out about the surrogacy thing (by tracking down Mia's estranged parents); she also finds out about the abortion, but thinks it was Pearl's, as Lexie gave a false name (yeah, why didn't anyone say anything to clear that up...?), and so she now sees Pearl as the wicked seductress of her older boy. When Elena forces Mia and Pearl to leave, she breaks everyone's heart: Trip loses his girlfriend, and Moody the girl he secretly loved; Lexie loses a mother-figure; Izzy loses the person who was encouraging her creativity and sense of agency; Pearl loses the stability she'd just begun to appreciate, as well as her most intimate relationship. It's Elena, really, who is planting little fires everywhere, and razing everything to the ground...

We open, as I said, with the Richardsons' house ablaze, and family speculation about who was responsible. I was expecting some surprise turnaround with regard to the culprit, but it doesn't come... The firebrand was indeed the person fingered in the first few pages. Izzy, angry and hurt, is spurred to take this action by a chance comment -- about prairie fires encouraging new growth -- that Mia certainly didn't intend to be taken literally.

That, and the revenge Bebe manages to wreak by snatching her baby, and heading off to Hong Kong, give us a little too much closing melodrama, I think.

I very much liked, though, that Ng absolutely doesn't offer us a neat and tidy ending, but leaves many of the threads untied.



***

Overall, a mixed bag. But I can't agree with Lionel Shriver, who -- despite recognizing the quality of the writing -- ended up feeling he didn't really care about the characters, and wondering what the overall point was... I did feel moved by the characters' plight, and would argue that the overall point is precisely the one Shriver identifies a few sentences earlier: "Ng deliberately sets poorer biological mothers against prosperous couples who might provide more opportunities, thus asking in whose custody a child is better off."

Rich Elena has brought up four children who all have issues, one way or another. Rich Lexie has eradicated the child she's carrying (not that I blame her). Cash-strapped Mia has deprived Pearl of a comfortable life with the rich couple who "commissioned" her (and this encounter with the Richardsons is really the first opportunity Pearl has had to assess how life might be different from the hand-to-mouth, on-the-move existence she has grown used to). But Mia has given her daughter the kind of gritty life-experience that's precisely what the spoilt Richardson kids lack. Bebe has deprived May Ling of the cosseted environment her would-be adoptive parents can provide, but has assured she will grow up rooted in the familial and social ties of her own culture.

That's a big enough overall point to make Little Fires Everywhere a worthwhile listen.