Book Review: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng

Someone bought this novel for me a few years ago and it has been sitting on my bookshelf ever since, until recently I picked it up to read in a fit of boredom. Published in 2017, this is Celeste Ng’s second major novel. Her debut novel, Everything I never told you, won the Hopwood Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Little Fires Everywhere was a critically-acclaimed bestseller and has been made into a TV mini-series starring Reese Witherspoon (premiered on Hulu and later generally released on Amazon Prime).

This novel was a bestseller, and therefore it feels a little churlish of me to have failed to find it as compelling as others obviously did. This is not to suggest that I hated it, but simply that I found it a struggle at times. The opening chapter, which describes the housefire that occurs at the climax of the story, in theory should make the beginning of the novel grab the reader’s attention – writers are always being told to begin in medias res, after all. But somehow I found this chapter strangely lacking in drama – there seemed to be a large ensemble of characters, their names all introduced in this first chapter, and I couldn’t get a grip on who they all were straight away. The reader isn’t thrown straight into the drama of the fire itself but into its slightly dull aftermath, and though there were many hints at what had happened and who had done it, these hints were too confusing or too dull to fully engage my attention. And I have to be honest (potential spoiler alert here), when I finally reached the end of the novel, I found the full revelation about who caused the fire and why to be slightly underwhelming and obvious, and is more or less revealed in this first chapter.

            However, this is a ‘literary’ novel, and Ng is a serious writer. She doesn’t go in for fancy tricks or plot twists. She is aiming to say something profound and meaningful about life. And the fact is, though I did find Chapter One tedious, I nevertheless read on. In fact, I was roughly halfway through before I became fully engaged with the story, but the fact that I kept reading anyway, despite this, says more about the novel’s strengths than about my staying power. Ng’s style is lucid and easy to follow. This isn’t one of those irritating books where the author is showing off his/her cleverness by using elaborate imagery, obscure references and ‘experimental’ narrative devices. It is a reasonably complex plot which is organised effectively and told with great clarity. And I suspect that is actually where my lack of interest comes from, sadly.

            On my MA in Creative Writing, we were told repeatedly to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’. While there are obviously times when telling is needed, the advice was usually to always try to show people’s emotions through their dialogue and actions rather than just telling the reader. But Ng tends to tell us what is going on inside characters’ heads: she describes what they do, often in retrospect or summarised, so we are given the information quite quickly, and she tends to focus on the aftermath of emotionally-intense situations – for instance, when Lexie has an abortion, we learn very little about the experience itself but we see her being comforted by Mia afterwards and we are told about how her sister Izzy and Mia’s daughter Pearl feel about this. When Pearl begins to have sex with Lexie’s brother, Trip, we are told this and given a quick overview of how it comes about, but I never felt truly involved in Pearl’s feelings about the experience.  In fact, I never felt that I knew Pearl much at all, throughout the novel, despite her being such a central character. We are told a great deal about Elena’s thought processes and why she has certain emotions, but we actually see very little interaction between her and her children and husband. We are told that Mia and Pearl are very close and given information about their life together, but we see very little of this tight bond in operation. This has a distancing effect on the reader – I felt that I didn’t care about the characters as much as I was intended to, which made their experiences less compelling.

            I wondered about the necessity for such a large cast of characters too. For example, I found the character of Moody to be ultimately superfluous to the plot – in the early chapters, I felt like he was going to be a central element in the unfolding plot, but in fact by the end I couldn’t really see what his purpose in the narrative was at all, other than as a means of introducing Pearl to the Richardson family. Nevertheless, all the characters are realistic and psychologically plausible. They respond like real people, they interact like real people. But we are generally kept at arm’s length from them, mainly due to the necessity for Ng to keep all these different characters’ individual stories going, like spinning plates on the tops of poles that have to be constantly swivelled to keep them spinning. And, though the writing seems effortless and unflashy (which I liked), and there are some lovely images here and there, I did feel that occasionally it dipped into cliché in the language-choices it employed.

            There were two particular strengths to this novel which struck me and made it overall a satisfactory read. One was the clever plotting. Each character’s responses to each other and to events leads quite naturally to what happens next – one event leads to another in a way that seemed completely natural and never contrived. In fact, I would have liked a bit more drama, as ultimately everyone was oddly calm and controlled. There were no spiteful cat-fights, screaming matches, bitter arguments – it was all rather constrained and quiet. The simmering emotional cauldron Ng kept hinting at never really materialised. There were moments when I almost hoped for something terrible to happen – the most dramatic event in the novel, relating to the infant Mirabelle/May Ling at the heart of the story, was narrated with a singular lack of dramatic impact. The revelations were interesting but not much more than that. Mia was by far the most interesting character but even with her I rarely felt that I was being invited into her inner life, or at least not very far in. There always seemed to be a bit more psychic distance than I needed.  It occurred to me at one point that this style of writing is something I employ in my own short stories at times, and I wondered whether this was the aspect that my final coursework marker on the MA course referred to as being ‘rather pedestrian in places’, lacking in variety. It was odd, but enlightening, to find myself criticising a well-respected novelist for a writing style which is like my own!

            The thing I thought Ng did superbly well was her descriptions of Mia’s photographs. Mia is an artist, her medium photography, and she is presented as being exceptionally talented. This is always extremely difficult for writers to convey. How do you get across to the reader the experience a viewer of a Rembrandt painting or the listener of a Beethoven concerto has, when you only have words on a page?  Getting across the idea that Mia is gifted and original takes real skill. Ng does it wonderfully. She spends a lot of time describing Mia’s artistic method, her ideas, the ways she brings media and objects and thoughts together and creates works of art that you can imagine would be sought-after. Ng gives us just enough information to whet our appetite, to make us feel that Mia has true talent, without describing the works in such detail that they begin to seem trivial, banal, unexciting. I felt that maybe Ng herself had ability as a visual artist as well as a writer: she certainly has a great deal of expertise and a very active and creative imagination. It was in fact these passages about Mia’s artwork that kept me reading and which have stayed with me since. They are also not there purely for decoration or for back-story – they are central to Mia’s character and crucial elements of the story’s climax.

You can find out more about Celeste Ng at: https://www.celesteng.com/about

RATING: Little Fires Everywhere ***

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way