Analysis

Little Fires Everywhere In this Celeste Ng's second novel, "Little Fires Everywhere," you will recognize a few ingredients from her acclaimed introduction, "Everything I Never Told You." There are the indications of racial tensions and incendiary family interactions under the surface of a quiet Ohio town. There are the appeal and hopelessness of assimilation, the all-consuming intensity of motherhood and the concealed lives of teenagers and their progenitors, each unknowable to the other. And there's a typical frame, too: At each novel's beginning, we know at least part of the melodrama that will befall the personalities, the mystery lies in understanding how they arrive there. In "Little Fires Everywhere," we begin with a house fire and new puzzles: Who set it, and why? The residence belongs to Elena and Bill Richardson, an affluent white couple who summarize success correctly, late '90s Shaker Heights, and their four teenage children, including girl-next-door Lexie and the troubled prankster Izzy, who is the suspected arson. "The firefighters said there were little fires everywhere," Lexie says. "Multiple locations of origin. Possible use of an accelerant. Not an accident." However, Izzy isn't the only one who appears to have fled the scene. Mia Warren and her daughter (a 15-year-old girl), Pearl, have also disappeared, abandoning the small house they rented from the Richardsons. Consequently, Ng again revisits the past for answers. It's Mia and Pearl's appearance in town 11 months earlier that starts the story. Mia is an alluring protagonist, a misfit traveler who might stand for Artist. She and Pearl have explored the country in their VW Rabbit with Mia's camera, living in dozens of municipalities before settling in Shaker Heights, here, Mia promises her daughter they will stay. Pearl, desiring to belong, quickly becomes a fixture in the Richardsons' home, involving her mother along with her. Witnessing these two families as they intermix and the clash is an utterly engrossing, often heartbreaking, profoundly empathetic encounter, not unlike watching a neighbor's house burn. And the exhibition doesn't stop with the Richardsons and Warrens. Ng also includes a custody battle that becomes the center of the town's attention, a 1-year-old girl who both her Chinese immigrant mother and the white couple who has raised the baby dispute. It's this vast and complicated labyrinth of moral affiliations and the nuanced all-knowing voice that Ng employs to navigate it, that makes this novel even more ambitious and accomplished than her debut. As soon as we meet the matriarch "Mrs. Richardson stood on the tree lawn, clutching the neck of her pale blue robe closed," we have the deceitful sense that our well-mannered storyteller is speaking from both inside and above the order-obsessed neighborhood.