Mysteries of arson, kinship and community

LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE Celeste Ng Loot.co.za (R 296) Little Brown

CELESTE Ng’s second novel, Little

Fires Everywhere, reads not so much as a successor to her first,

Everything I Never Told You, and more like a companion piece. Middle-class, Midwest suburban family life is her subject; the teenage girls therein her specialty. Both novels are period pieces – Everything was set in the 1970s, this time round it’s the 1990s: teenagers lounge around watching Jerry Springer, only a privileged few have pagers, and a cinema trip to see Titanic is the hottest date in town. Central to the story played out in

Little Fires Everywhere is the clash between two families. The Richardsons (whose large picture-perfect house in Cleveland’s progressive Shaker Heights neighbourhood, with its four cars in the copious driveway, is the one going up in smoke when the novel opens) and Mia Warren, a previously nomadic artist and her 15-year-old daughter Pearl. Mother and daughter are Mrs Richardson’s tenants, but then Pearl strikes up a friendship with the Richardson clan – he’s a lawyer and she’s a reporter, and they have four children: Trip, Lexie, Moody, and Izzy – after which Mrs Richardson, seeing herself as something of a philanthropist, insists that instead of paying rent each month, At its heart, it’s a story about motherhood – surrogacy, abortion, adoption, the trails of a flesh and blood relationship, all versions are considered. “The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” Lexie tells her brothers as they eye up the charred, steaming shell that is their home in the aftermath of the blaze. “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.” The same could be said of the novel itself. Ng paces her narrative like a pro, consummately entwining multiple threads until each and every character is implicated in the denouement.