Little Fires Everywhere tells the story of a mysterious artist and her daughter, who arrive in the orderly, upper-class, progressive suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio - only to whisk away in the night a few months later. Their story intertwines inextricably with that of the Richardsons, a wealthy, established family with four children worming their way through high school.

The story is founded on a few key themes that are so pronounced, they seem to motivate the plot more than the characters themselves. First and foremost, there’s the contrast of artistic expression with orderly regulation. Then there’s the complex question of race, and the role it plays, or should play, in a harmonious society. And finally, there is the puzzling question of what, exactly, constitudes a harmonious society in the first place - is it one typified by smoothly functioning institutions, or is it one which finds a place for everyone, no matter how unconventional or unusual? These are fascinating themes, and questions well-explored in the story; in fact I would say that this story has made me think about artistic expression, and the undeniable passion that motivates it, in a way I had not quite considered before.

The theme of art as a counterpoint to order was the one which seemed the most striking to me. This theme is echoed in the conflict between two of the main characters, Elena Richardson and Mia Wright: the former a paragon of orderliness and rigidity, the latter an artist who marches to the tune of her own drummer. Richardson is a pillar of her community, someone who can trace her roots in Shaker Heights almost back to the founding of the town. Wright is the exact opposite, a nomad who uproots herself and her daughter at the drop of a hat, always in search of more inspiration and a new place to live. Over the course of the novel our sympathies migrate, gradually, away from Richardson and towards Wright. And in somewhat parallel fashion we grow to see how orderliness and artistic vision are not so much in contrast as they are co-dependent on one another, in much the same way that Wright’s life, and Richardson’s life, become tightly interwoven.

The idea that art and orderliness are interwoven is exhibited most powerfully through the image of Mia Wright’s photographs. I think these images are perhaps the most fascinating element of this book - they are drawn in rich and engrossing detail, and their effervescence makes them all the more mysterious. And yet for all that they are highly structured objects, crafted painstakingly over the course of months, composed and curated and fussed over for long periods of time. In this way, they are not so different from the community of Shaker Heights itself - except insofar as the photographs are transient, sold or obliterated as soon as the artist has completed them; whereas the town doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

For all that I enjoyed this book tremendously, I do think one of the most serious shortcomings is the surprising lack of growth in Mia’s character. For all that she is a fascinating, complex person, she seems not to grow or change at all over the course of the story. She instead functions as a sort of saint, the person who seems to be a beacon of comfort for every character in turn. Instead the book seems to demand that the reader’s perception of Mia should change over the course of the narrative. Whereas we begin by reading her as a flighty, unreliable mother, we wind up thinking of her as the only clear-headed, ever-sympathetic adult in the whole ensemble; there doesn’t seem to be anything she can do wrong.

Celeste Ng seems to enjoy setting racially tinged family epics about the lives of Asian Americans in the Midwest, and to her credit that’s a fascinating and unexplored literary territory. I found Little Fires Everywhere to be a big step up from Everything I Never Told You, and I recommend it emphatically.