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. 

A Book to Read for the Day of Truth and Reconciliation, September 30

I repeat: the circumstances in which you read a book may have a big effect on what you think of it.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, reading A Month in the Country during a beautiful August probably made me like the book even more than I would have had I read it in another month.  But it's not just weather that affects the attitude we bring to a book's reading.  What's happening in the world can have a very strong influence.

 

A case in point is Kukum by Michel Jean.  Originally written in French, it is now available in a very good English translation by Susan Ouirou, but I read it first in French in the spring of 2021.  I was taken with the opening scenes:  the young woman who would become Jean's kukum, his grandmother, is an orphan who has been taken in by a couple trying to carve a farm from the forests of Quebec's North Shore.  She is grateful to them, but when a young Innu man comes down the river she (and he) fall desperately in love with one another even though they don't have a common language.  There follows an account of their life together, in the bush, following the caribou, hunting and gathering, telling stories and building dreams.  The life is very hard, but the way Jean tells it, almost idyllic. 

 

Then the outside world intrudes in the form of clear-cut forests, mineral exploration and changes to water flows.  The little family is forced to leave their semi-nomadic life and settle in a rudimentary village.  Then the RCMP comes to take the children away to school...

 

The day I read that was the day that news of the discovery of the remains of some 200 children on the grounds of a residential school in British Columbia  came out.  The coincidence was like a blow to the gut, the pain of Kukum and her family resonating with that of the families whose children were sent to the Kamloops residential school and who never came home. 

 

But Kukum survived as did some of her children, and luckily, Jean, who was the weekend anchor TVA news for several years, is here to tell the tale. 

 

The investigation into suspected grave sites continues. The Day of Truth and Reconciliation is worth remembering. 

Sean Michaels Writes an Unabashedly AI-assisted, Very Good Novel

There's been a lot in the news these last days about Artificial Intelligence as people who know what's going on in the industry send out alarms of a looming apocalypse.  At the same time, the people who make books are trying to use AI to streamline production and/or weed out AI slop from the projects submitted to them. 

So this week, I decided to look at a recent novel whose author, Sean Michaels, unabashedly used AI to write bits of it.  Do You Remember Being Born?

, published in 2023 by Random House Canada, is the story of Marian ffarmer, a  celebrated, somewhat elderly poet who is enlisted by a tech company to write a work of poetry with Charlotte, a precursor to ChatGPT, Claude and friends.  She takes the assignment partly because she'd like to help her middle-aged son buy a house- -the collaboration comes with a handsome honorarium--and partly out of curiosity.  Michaels acutely observes the world of high tech, and also provocatively raises questions about what is art, and who can make it.  The result is a lively and sometimes touching tale, cleverly told.

Note that Michaels started working on the novel years before the present controversy.  He saw the dangers and possibilities in AI long before most people outside the world of those constructing Large Language Models did.  He is cagey about whether the poem Marian and Charlotte write is of any value.  In addition, he allows a suspicion that maybe Charlotte is not a chatbot but a real person.    

I was able to ask him about that last possibility when I was preparing to talk about the book in one of the discussion groups I've led in libraries.  His reply: ".. I'm afraid that's a question meant for you to answer yourself. For me to do so would be cheating." 

 

A man of honour, perhaps! 

 As for the prospect of an AI catastrophe and the end of civilization, that question has been around for a long time, although the voices warning against such a fate are becoming more and more strident.  I spent the last several years worrying about it: the result is my recent book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years (Dundurn Press).  My conclusion?  Collective wisdom will be a powerful tool as civilizations attempt to overcome the major upheavals ahead.