Readers,
Back in Melbourne after a whirlwind trip to New Zealand to celebrate Dad's 60th. Good times had all around (torrential rain, massive quantities of expensive whisky, five large bodies in a too-small rental car, board games used to stave off the boredom of the aforementioned rain, more whisky). Mother chastised me for forgetting to bring her The Diary of a Bookseller. My father chastised me for not saying enough nice things about Ready Player One. And my sister didn't chastise me at all (except for being a messy, generally lazy lump who never cooks - but that was well deserved).
However, the highlight of the weekend was Mother (who grew up in rural Pennsylvania where there was not a lot of entertainment) teaching us about a peculiar phenomenon. She made us stand in a doorway, and press the tops of both wrists hard into the door frame for sixty-seconds. We then stepped forward. Do it and you'll find your arms float to the ceiling of their own free will - as if you are about to take involuntary flight. Go on and try it. (Father: "After nearly forty years of marriage! I can't believe you never taught me this!"; Sister: "I"m going to teach all my flat mates as soon as I get home."; Brother: "Clearly they didn't have television when you were growing up.")
I tell you this, readers, because I want you to know that my family is just a normal family passing the time. My family, in fact, is exceedingly like the family in Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. The family in Ng's novel is so normal that they could appear on any number of American sitcoms as the the stand up next door neighbors. They are the cast of people who aren't quite interesting enough to get their own show, but are fun enough to play bit parts in a greater drama.
The premise is this: a free-spirited artist, Mia, and her daughter, Pearl, move into a rental property owned by the thoroughly suburban Richardson family. These two families become entangled with one another, and then, together, they become entangled in an unfolding drama involving an abandoned Chinese baby, a desperate-to-adopt white couple, and a remorseful birth mother. If this seems like an odd twist, it also feels odd in the book, I assure you.
It's jarring to read a novel where the central drama has little to no consequence for any of the main characters' lives. It's dissatisfying, but it's also fascinating. Throughout this novel there is a preoccupation with the dramatic-adjacent. One Richardson daughter, Lexie, is a high-school gossip who then becomes the subject of every high-school's most horrifying kind of drama. Another daughter, Izzy, repeatedly finds the need to "do something" about situations in which she has no business getting involved. The Richardson mother digs up past dirt under the guise of journalistic endeavor, and Mia is so deep in artistic melodrama that she has lost her grip on the reality of raising a daughter. The book circles around drama without ever really touching. In fact, there are only two truly dramatic scenes. In one, we are literally left in the waiting room, forced to the periphery. The other - that of the opening chapter - is treated with cool detachment.
I think this is extremely clever. By playing with drama but never serving it up, the novel is able to talk about essentially boring people in an interesting way. It's able to take up the mundane without glorifying it - to give us a peek into our own daily lives while saying "probably nothing interesting is happening to you right now. But that's okay, what you're doing is still worthwhile."
I think the reason I liked this so much is because I have been feeling stagnant recently. I just completed a move to a new country. Now that I'm settled in, I'm starting to wonder what I'm doing here. This novel comforted me. There wasn't any sort of revelation to it, but it made me feel calmer to realize that being on the periphery of drama is sometimes more than enough, to be an observer in life is not to waste it, but to experience it from a different perspective. Little Fires Everywhere is not saying that the mundane is interesting, it's saying that the mundane is reality: it's what we get to be going on with.
The ending of Little Fires Everywhere is the only flawed part of this novel, which is otherwise beautifully crafted. It's greatest strength is its ability to give interiority to even minor characters (in the vein of George Eliot) who may only appear for a few paragraphs. Here is Ng doing this in just a few sentences for a lonely, neighborhood man, "They were observed only once. Mr. Yang, on his way home from bus-driving duty, steered his light blue Saturn down Parkland Drive and saw a Jeep Cherokee pulled to the side of the road, two teens inside pressed against each other...It was none of his business, he thought to himself, though for the rest of the afternoon he found himself day-dreaming, back to his own teenage years in Hong Kong, sneaking into the botanical gardens with Besty Choy...The young are the same, always and everywhere, he thought, and he shifted the car into gear and drove on."