Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and Good Intentions

 

 Until she edited the Best American Short Stories 2025, I'd never read anything by Celeste Ng.  My family, knowing how I love short stories, sees that I get the year's edition each Christmas, and I read the volume usually with delight.  The formula is simple: the series' editor picks 100 short stories from all those published in dozens of literary magazines. Then a guest editor reads them all and chooses 20 that he or she thinks are the best.  Occasionally I find an editor's choices uninteresting, but rarely.  And I really liked what Ng chose last year.  So, I decided to find out what she has written herself.   

 

Don't get me wrong:  I found myself reading her second novel (the one I was able to get by Libby late at night) Little Fires Everywhere long after my usual bedtime because I was captivated by the story.  But when I'd finished the book I was let down because there were important parts of the story that just didn't hang together. 

 

The novel starts with several little fires raging in a house and a mother and teenage daughter leaving town.  We find out at the end just what has happened, and, while we are carefully prepared for the the ending, in the morning after a reading binge, the impossibility of situation hits one between the eyes like the rising sun on a hangover headache.  

 

To go into the details about why Ng's story doesn't work, I'd give away too much.  But I can say that what got me interested and what kept me reading was the brilliant depiction of her charcters and the vivid picture of life as an upper middle-class adolescent in the 1990s.  Full points for that. 

 

The story takes place in the Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland.  It is a planned community, proud of its history.  Its citizens, according to Ng, are convinced of their moral superiority in part because of their purported "colour blindness."  A lot of this is pretense, Ng says, and she is cruelly funny when she points out the contradictions of a community stalwart. 

 

Why does Ng do this?  Because she wants to demolish self-righteousness?  Because she thinks we all should take off into the sunset as do the mother and teenage daughter who kick off the story?  I was convinced that was the case until I came upon an interview with her.   

 

Here's what she said,  "So many people try to do what they think is right. Even when they do things that end up being terrible, it often comes out of a place with good intentions. All the characters in Little Fires Everywhere are doing something they think is justified and moral. I wanted this book to be a space for looking at people who seem like villains to us in order to understand how they got to where they are. If we understand how they got to where they are, then we have a better chance connecting with them in some way. There are very few real villains in the world, just like I think there are very few heroes."

 

When I read that I nodded my head: I agree that most people do want to do the right thing.  That's not what I took away from this book, though, so if that was Ng's intention she failed with me. But it's a good read if you don't think too much about it.