"Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng

In her new book, an American of Chinese origin, Celeste Ng, as if deliberately trying to do everything differently, as in the "Everything I Never Told You" debut that brought her popularity. The theme of cultural identity and integration, the key to the previous novel, this time brought to the periphery, as well as the topic of unbearable parental expectations that can break the back of a nervous and sensitive adolescent. This time, the focus of attention on Ng is the conflict of order and chaos, a world of structured and prosaic on the one hand, and a world of creative, free and reckless on the other. Moreover, despite the attempt of objectivity, the reader quite quickly understands which side the author’s sympathies are: of course, the fruitful chaos in the eyes of Celeste Ng is incomparably better than the boring and inert world of reliability and prosperity, to which she passes the verdict with the utmost seriousness and directness.

The Shaker Heights suburb of Cleveland is the realm of well-being and decency, and the Richardson family (father is a successful lawyer, mother is a journalist of a local newspaper, four beautiful and intelligent teenage children, an immaculate home, a perfect lawn) are its exemplary inhabitants. They are well educated and successful, they have broad views and they are not alien to noble impulses - of course, if they do not go against the generally accepted norms. They are happy and harmonious in their sleepy little world (unless, of course, individual escapades are indomitable Izzy, their youngest daughter), while Mrs. Richardson does not decide to do a good deed - to pass the house to an empty couple next to her strangely homeless (and obviously , brilliant) artist Mie and her fifteen year old daughter Pearl.

From this moment on, Richardson has everything going awry. The mission, a few words, neat, hardworking and seemingly not at all dangerous, is not ready to play according to the rules adopted in Shaker Heights. She supports the impoverished Chinese immigrant who abandoned her newborn daughter and is now trying to get her back, taking the baby away from the wealthy couple McCullough - the ideal adoptive parents and closest friends of Mrs. Richardson. Mia warms and tames the rebel Izzy, demonstrating with her own example that the desire for freedom from convention is not at all a vice. It shows to the average people of Shaker Heights a completely different way of life - a strange, risky, and at the same time fraught with many joys, inaccessible to people with permanent jobs and a stable income.

Well, Mia’s daughter, the dark-haired beauty of Pearl, drives a death wedge between Richardson’s two sons, Trip, a handsome athlete and romantic dreamer Splin. Needless to say, Mrs. Richardson cannot endure all this: rejecting the mask of sanctimonious virtue, she begins to rummage in the mysterious past of Mia and Pearl, bringing to light the facts that would be better forever in the shadows. In addition, these discoveries entail the consequences of truly catastrophic and irreversible drama for all participants.

One of the fundamental ideas of Celeste Ng is the inadmissibility of cultural appropriation: this is how Mia struggles with her, taking the side of her biological mother against white adoptive parents. And yet, whipping the order and raising nonconformist chaos on a pedestal (even formally defeated, Mia leaves the Shaker Heights with her head held high), Ng commits precisely the sin that she herself condemns. Her attempt to speak on behalf of the rebels, in fact, is precisely a cultural appropriation - it would seem, not to her, a young woman from a wealthy family, a native of a rich suburb and a graduate of a prestigious university, with a teenage passion to sing the romance of scraps, skirmishes and spiritual quest.

If Jeannette Walls came up with a similar artistic statement, the creator of the autobiographical book "The Glass Castle" (Walls grew up with hippie parents and experienced all the delights of this “romance” in her own skin), this could be taken seriously. However, the most successful Celeste Ng, glorifying the anti-bourgeois escape and rebellion, looks a little better than the most unpleasant of its heroine Mrs. Richardson, convinced that any child — including Chinese — is always better in a rich and enlightened white family.

The illustrations are used in agreement with the Depositphotos photobank