Celeste Ng (2017) Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere was published in 2017 to critical acclaim and is still a number one bestseller in Amazon in 2020. It terms of book sales, the author has produced the literary equivalent of Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell. Being a writer that never writes much now, I thought I’d take a look. It’s a page turner — the end begins at the beginning. I liked it. The review should end here with recognition of that neat trick.

 One I’ve used myself, but as George Bernard Shaw famously said, (adlibbed) writers that can’t write, teach, and teachers that can’t teach, write review.

People that can’t write often ask people that read, what was the book about? The answers pretty simple. Rich man/Poor man, or, in this case, women. I might as well talk about themes.  Class and race. These are biggies in American politics. These are biggies in any politics. Here we have the affluent, white,  Elena Richardson, she’s a local reporter and her husband is a lawyer that works in nearby New York. He comes home to Shaker Heights, where his wife and four beautiful children reside.

Talking Heads, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHatn3_UxEU

Shaker Heights is somewhere we all know, a place where a former Vice President in the late nineteen century moved to get away from the stench of the urban poor. Houses are solid and well maintained and everything runs on rails. Elena Richardson is a third generation Shaker Heighter. They have not one house, but also two units. She admits she doesn’t really need the money, but likes to rent them out the right kind of people. Not charity, exactly. But Mr Yang, whom she rents to in Winslow Road (Down) is suitably grateful.

Here’s the hook to draw readers in:

‘Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer, how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough—or depending which side you were on, May Ling Chow—and now, at last, there was something new and emotional to discuss.’

Interrogate the text is a standard cry of creative-writing teachers. Interrogate The American Dream with the subtext Sidonie-Gabrielle Collete’s Gigi, ‘The bustling lives of people with nothing to do’. And remember how the rich are always telling us how incredibly busy they are. The reader is here left with a question, whodunnit, but the answer is in the text: Isabelle. In a book over 300 pages long in which Isabelle or Izzy doesn’t appear until about page 50, the reader suspects something more is going on.

In successful novels, one book becomes many books. George Bernard Shaw’s famous play ‘An Inspector Calls’ has an Inspector visiting a family after a tragic accident, or suicide that might have been murder.   Here we have Mia Warren, an artist and photographer with her daughter Pearl, arriving in a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle and renting half a house in Shaker Falls from Elena Richardson. Shaw’s dictum ‘That those that can’t change their mind, can’t change anything,’ is the kind of mantra, Mrs. Richardson lives by.

If you play by the rules, you’ll get your just reward is her firm belief, but she is a bit miffed that Mia isn’t properly grateful for the chance she’s been given for a better life. And she’s offended, although she doesn’t show it, that Mia won’t sell her one of her photographs because Mrs Richardson wants to help and she’s a struggling artist. She does shitty jobs to get by, her art is her life. Mrs Richardson can’t imagine what a shitty job feels like, but she wants to do the right thing and gives her a job as housekeeper in her home.

Mia is the ying to Mrs Richarson’s yang. Mia doesn’t play safe. She and her daughter’s possessions can fit snugly in the Beetle and when the time is right to move on, they do, pulled by the necessity of creating something new and rich. Mia’s life is her art, a living embodiment of Shaw’s fellow Irishman’s dictum: Art for Art sake.

There’s lots of doubling in Little Fires Everywhere. When you start making connections they burn through you. Mia and Elena. But also Pearl and Izzy. Moody (look at the name, remember what that means to be fifteen and in love) falls for Pearl (listen to her name, she’s lustrous). He’s lustrous too, but a virgin. They both are, he falls for her hard. Up close teenage life is always Romeo and Juliet. They’re best buddies and that gives Pearl entry into a kind of life she could only imagine, the kind of life she could get used to as she becomes a part of the Richardson household, part of the Richardson family. Pearl is doubled by Izzy, the black sheep of the family that moves in the other direction, helping Mia with her photography, idolising her and imagining what it would be like to have Mia and not Elena as her mother. She’d be the cuckoo in Mia’s nest. Pearl the cuckoo in the Richardson nest. But being like a daughter is not the same as being a daughter.

‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,’ as Mia said.

‘You look nice,’ said Trip to Pearl when they’re hanging out in the living room.

Trip is brainless but beautiful, girls in Shaker Heights—and pretty much everywhere they go—fall all over him, admitted Mrs Richardson to herself. She could imagine Pearl falling for Trip, but not the other way about.

‘She always looks nice,’ snapped Moody.

Lexie, the eldest of the Richardson children is eighteen and about to graduate and go to Yale. She’s queen bee at school. A bit like her brother. But she has a steady black boyfriend. You know what’s going to happen and it does, in the high-school, coming-of-age drama. Then we have the doubling of Lexie with Pearl, wearing her clothes and feel more Lexie and Lexie wearing Pearl’s grungy T-shirt and feeling more loved by Pia.

Most novice writers are asked a simple question to determine point of view. Whose story is this? An omniscient point of view is used here in the stories of many lives. For example, even Mr Yang, who lives below Mia and Pearl as a bystander also gets to tell his backstory. This shouldn’t work, but an artist putting a collage together can make one vison of many pictures. Some of the writing is great, which pushes Little Fires into the literary genre.   

For example, Moody’s first vision of Pearl, taken from his point of view, when he parks his bike and looks across at the new tenants moving in.

‘He saw a slender girl in a long crinkly skirt and a long loose T-shirt, with a message he couldn’t quite read. Her hair was long and curly and hung in a thick braid down her neck and gave the impression of straining to burst free. She had laid the headboard down flat near the flowerbeds that bordered the house, with the side rails below it and the slats to either side in neat rows, like ribs. It was as if the bed had drawn in a deep breath and then gracefully flattened itself into the grass.’

The last line, in particular, raises Ng’s writing to poetic realms of resonance. On the rare occasions she falls into cliché it can be overlooked. Backstories add to plot. Pia, for example, doubles with a fellow worker May Ling Chow in having a baby that has no real father. Pia’s backstory of acting as a surrogate mother for a rich couple is more akin to Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White, with Pia a doppelganger double for a New York matron unable to conceive. This in turn doubles with Mrs Richardson’s best friend, Linda McCullough (class of ’71) also having miscarriage after miscarriage and remaining childless until finally she’s given a baby to adopt, one that’s been found on the doorstep of a fire station. It’s a Chinese baby, it’s May Ling Chow’s baby, and she wants it back. But as an immigrant worker with no money and no connections she has little rights.

Race rather than class rears its head. But they’re not mutually exclusive. Race and class double up against each other and reveals hidden motives as characters confront their hidden prejudices. Little Fires interrogates what it means to be poor white, poor Chinese and what happens when choices need to be made. The Wisdom of Solomon is invoked. Often that’s not enough for a good story in our crazy world. You end up is T.S Eliot territory:

‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

Read on.   

The mad, the bad and the sad. Your number’s up.

Suzanne O’Sullivan (2015) It’s All in Your Head. True Stories of Imaginary Illness.

I like stories of imaginary illnesses. Dr Faraday in Sarah Waters The Little Stranger errs on the side of caution and attributes a collective form of psychosomatic illness to the aristocratic Ayre’s family staying at rundown Hundreds Hall, and the subconscious as place and time combine, the equivalent of old cartographers whom declared this be the end of the world, here be ghosts. The coroner at Caroline’s death was quite happy to accept that she died while her mind was unbalanced. I thought it was her body that toppled over the balcony, but there you go, it was her mind. The two are inextricably linked.

Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White has private asylums, doppelgangers and rich hypochondriac uncles that can’t bear loud noise, or indeed most everyday noise, as key parts of his plot.

Suzanne O’Sullivan touches on The Devils of Louden and it’s clear that she doesn’t think there was anything devilish about them. O’Sullivan calls for a compassionate response to those suffering from illness, whether mental or physical, because one impinges on the other. Fling in Abigail Williams from The Crucible. It takes more than one to cry witch, to be heard and collective responsibility must be taken seriously. One of my favourite stories wasn’t directly about the sad, the mad or the bad, but the gullibility of the rich for new fads.

I’m biased in that way. Those that could afford a nurse and private asylum in Collins’s time would be treated far better than those in Bethlem Royal Hospital that coined the term Bedlam.  Just before the start of the First World War a young Winston Churchill was calling for the creation of purpose-built asylums where feeble-minded men and women could be segregated from the general population. Sterilisation of women would be compulsory to ensure they did not reproduce. These measures were introduced in some American states. Eugenics is a rallying call against the poor. I like to listen to rallying calls against the rich. If you want to look at how the poor were treated during the First World War for shell shock Pat Barker’s Regeneration novels shows the dichotomy of how anthropologist, ethnologist, neurologist and psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers treated officers of the ruling class at Lockhart hospital, most notably Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, and how Rivers’s counterparts tortured working-class soldiers until they were reported fit for duty. Post-traumatic-stress disorder treated with electric shocks to make the blind see and the lame walk is nothing new. If you’ve got an imaginary friend you better get on the blower to him quick style.

Julian Barnes short story ‘Harmony’ tells the story of a young musical prodigy Maria, born 15^th May 175-. The child’s health was normal, until she woke up blind at the age of three and half. It was held to be the perfect case of amaurosis, there was no fault detectable in the organs of the eyes, but she was blind. Her condition was attributed to some fright the she received during the night. Her musical education continued and the blind infant prodigy was much sought after in royal courts throughout Europe. M—sought to cure her with magnetism, with some success, but Maria’s parents were not blind to society’s measuring rod and blind prodigy was a mere prodigy without her condition.

O’Sullivan notes that whilst psychosomatic disorders may be thought of an illness of perception, there’s no escaping the damning statistic that seventy percent of such disorders are suffered by women. She draws not just on local knowledge but a wide body of research. A 2011 German study, for example, showed that twenty-two percent of those attending the equivalent of our GPs had a somatising disorder. Somatising disorder means that although the illness the patient comes to get treated for is real enough for the patient those treating the patient can find no organic reason why he or she is presenting those symptoms. The World Health Organisation 1997 estimated that twenty percent of those attending their doctor had at least six ‘medically unexplained symptoms’.  More recent pilot studies in London confirms the WHO’s findings. They are the imaginary friend in the room with doctor and patient. Hollywood is good at this kind of thing. Think The Three Faces of Eve, but the patient has only brought two faces into the consulting room and is presenting with a bit of a cough. Some of the cases presented by O’Sullivan are highly symbolic and could be said to be straight forward. The woman that goes blind and is unable to keep her eyes open after her husband is taken to jail for abusing a neighbour’s child. Women that take pseudoseizures (or dissociative seizures) at work. The language is useful and how the patient describes their seizure has been modelled and analyses to differentiate between psuedoseizures and epileptic seizures. One behavioural, the other which can be accurately measured by EEG. With no increased electrical activity in the brain O’Sullivan asks and answers the question are they real? Yes and No.

O’Sullivan widens the scope to those outside her practice whom she has come into direct contact with. The estimated 250 000 reported cases classified as Myalgic Encephalomylitis (ME) and/or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Two million CFS cases are documented in The United States.  The disease or syndrome is real enough for those suffering from it. Each new case is looking for a cure, another test, another diagnosis.

The neurologist Weir Mitchell rest cure was a response to Charcot’s definition of hysteria in women extreme fatigue, but geared towards rich men in Philadelphia. The crème de la crème who were thinking too much and suffering from neurasthenia. Patients were force fed fatty foods to build them up. Discouraged from standing. A bedpan was brought to them for their toilet needs. They could not read. Have conversations, or have any type of stimulation. Although this sounds much like my local pub, they were charged extraordinary amounts of money for their cure. If the cure didn’t work, apply more cure.

Our government’s response is  predictable, a wooly response, to place wellbeing at the centre of their strategy; delay of the publication of critical report,  A Five Year Forward View for Mental Health; promises of more money for NHS Mental Health services, a mooted figure of £1 billion to ‘plug gaps in service’; whilst as Daniel Boffey notes ‘incentivising’ the 250 000 with recognised psychiatric conditions to find work by cutting currently classified as disabled from £102.15 per week to 72.40 per week. Using the government’s template those with ME or CFS could be ‘incentivised’ to be cured by cutting disability payments to a more manageable figure of £0.00.

As O’Sullivan notes most ME/CFS sufferers have good reason to be defensive. Whether in or out of employment, they are regarded as the shirkers of the medical system, using up valuable resources that could be used better elsewhere. The government diagnosis of a personal defect poor people suffer from that can be instantly cured by them finding a job and the cynicism of medical staff that grow weary of test after test finding no organic reason for illness and an increasing readiness to find the failing in the patient is a potent mix. O’Sullivan calls for ‘an open mind’ but that door is already closed.

‘Neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis, yuppie flu, dissociative seizures, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures.’

Hippocrates 200 AD suggested hysteria was too much or too little of something: black bile, yellow bile, blood or phlegm. If any of the four humours were in conjunction the trouble may be the master organ of the wandering womb and the sympathetic responses travelling in spirit form induced in the patient. I quite liked the nineteen-century idea of such conditions being down to engorgement of the nasal membrane, but then again I do have a big nose.

‘So now I’m a psycho, am I?’ asks more than one of O’Sullivan’s patients.

‘This is boring now, I think you should get better,’ Jo Marchant’s father says to his daughter in an extract of her memoir Cure.

As O’Sullivan notes, ‘In the twenty-first century psychosomatic illness is a socially unacceptable disorder’. The media plays its part in carrying the symptoms that are spread throughout the general population. But on the bright side we no longer burn people as witches.  Of course the condition, syndrome, illness or whatever label you want it put on it is a matter of perception and the votes are in. Any right-thinking type would know who can be cured will be cured, the others are psychos. In the same way the First World War the Krauts or Bosche needed more cold steel right up them to be pushed back patients with ME/CFS are a small minority of shirkers that need to find work is finding increasing traction. She is a voice of reason, but she is drowned out by those with louder voices, big sticks and the ability to push their agenda through. When we are told it is not a question of money, we can be sure it is.  O’Sullivan tells us ‘laughter can be therapeutic’. Ha. Ha. That sounds like a cheap option, but more tests will be needed.