Dependence
In several of the stories in the collection, Kennedy explores the concept of dependence and how it shapes her characters' relationships. Kennedy's characters rarely relish their dependence, though none naturally despise it more than Frank, husband of the protagonist of "Flexion." In Like a House on Fire, the dependence is generally brought on by some medical event. In Frank's case, the event was a vehicle accident. In the case of the narrator of the titular story, the event is his herniated disc. For Mr. Moreton, it's his emphysema. Jason is dependent on Michelle because he's a newborn, and Michelle finds that she is not as dependent on the midwives and Des as she once thought. Ray depends upon the generosity of his friends after Sharon casts him out of their house, and he stays in a shed. Kennedy seizes on the potential of dependence to change the dynamics of relationships.
In "Like a House on Fire," Kennedy shows how the burden of dependence goes both ways. The narrator emphasizes how his humiliation and the indignities of not being able to do things for himself cause further humiliation when his wife, Claire, struggles to remain measured in the course of caring for him. She tells him that when requests come "from someone lying flat on their back in the middle of a busy family room, it morphs pretty quickly into orders" (84), and when he insists that he's not faking the injury, and that it's not all in his head, she says, "I'm not saying you're faking it, for crying out loud. Why would you put us all through this?" (85). Here, Claire denies the narrator claim to the full share of suffering, despite the fact that he's the one with the injury.
On the other hand, Kennedy shows how dependence can also allow for grace and, in turn, kindness and generosity. Dependence can bring out the best in people, qualities that they hadn't even known themselves to possess. In "Laminex and Mirrors," Mr. Moreton is fully dependent on the people around him. His lack of independence puts so much power in the hands of strangers, like the narrator of the story, who finds herself in a position to change a man's life simply by virtue of her ability to push a wheelchair and purchase cigarettes.
Agency and Control
Closely related to the theme of dependence is that of agency and control. Of course, when someone is dependent on another person or on a structure or institution, they at least partially lack agency and control; but Kennedy's stories pay special attention to how one loses and attains, retains, and/or attempts to regain agency. In "Like a House on Fire," for example, Kennedy heavily emphasizes the idea of control. The whole reason the narrator is in his predicament is because he simply couldn't abdicate control; he had to trim that one "errant" branch, and it led to his herniated disc (81).The narrator's wife calls him a control freak, and while the narrator is "genuinely shocked" (84), Claire is quick to point out his peculiar choice of spot to lie on his back all day: in the middle of the living room. "Why there?" she asks, "Just where you can keep your eye on everything, like Central Control?" (84)
In "Laminex and Mirrors," Kennedy further explores the concept of agency in the dynamic of patient and caretaker; she also explores and stretches the meaning of the word "caretaker," in the sense that the narrator is technically more of a bystander than a caretaker. She's frequently reminded by the other hospital workers, the nurses, and the head cleaner, Marie, that she is not a caretaker. She's told not to "fraternize" with the patients, namely Mr. Moreton. Her agency as a member of the cleaning staff is limited in the eyes of the hospital, but as an individual, she has a lot more latitude. While Mr. Moreton obviously lacks agency in the sense that he can't manifest his desires to take a bath and smoke a cigarette on his own, he still exercises his agency to engage those around him and try to recruit them with his charm and attention. The narrator of "Laminex and Mirrors" in turn exercises her agency as an individual, sheds her hospital employee obligations, and in the triumphant climax of the story, gets Mr. Moreton his bath and cigarette.
Youth and Aging
Kennedy trains her narrative eye on every stage in the cycle of life. Her stories discuss birth, death, prime and middle age, and the stalled years in between. In "Sleepers," she explicitly juxtaposes Ray, who is in his mid-thirties, to Sean, Steve's teenage son, in a scene at a barbecue in Steve's back yard. Sean is looking at the dusk sky and thinks he spots Mars through his telescope. He calls Ray over to look, and Ray has an acute physical reaction to the scent of Sean: "the smell of him—grass and sunscreen, sweat and energy, all of it barely contained—registered in Ray's head with a sudden painful awareness. This shortness of breath, the pressure on his chest..." (134)—and the chest pains immediately call to mind Ray's father, who died of a heart attack. Ray thinks he should maybe make an appointment with the doctor and get a check-up. So this moment of beholding youth triggers a cascade of spiraling thoughts, and Ray immediately positions himself in a succession of generations. Sean's youth and vitality disturb him because they're reminders of what he used, not so long ago, to possess himself.
The narrator of "Like a House on Fire" has a similar moment, but from the perspective of a parent. He sees that his son Ben, eight years old, is now making sarcastic cracks about Santa, and he thinks back to just the previous year, reading Ben's earnest letter to Santa. In "Laminex and Mirrors," Moreton looks down at his hands and wonders how just last year, he marched in a military parade. Now, he's in a hospital bed, awaiting death. Kennedy's stories expertly mark the passage of time in relation to their character's position in life.
Motherhood
Of the stories reviewed in this guide, two directly speak to the theme of motherhood: "Ashes" and "Five-Dollar Family." In "Ashes," Chris harbors a vicious disdain for his mother, and the whole time, he just tries to keep it under the surface and maintain civility. He views his mother no longer as someone who raised him, nurtured him, and cared for him, but as someone seeking nurture and care. She seeks to take and gain from him, and the thing she wants most, ironically, is grandchildren. The irony of this is that her role in Chris's life has strayed so far from parental. He feels responsible for her; he's the one placating her, wiping smudges off of her lapel. Of course, Chris's animosity is founded in the fraught nature of his relationship with his mother due to his inability to be open with her about his sexuality. Now in his forties, following the death of his father, Chris fears that his mother will want him to be her caretaker.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is "Five-Dollar Family," a story about Michelle, a new mother, learning that she possesses the inner resources to take care of her baby without the help of her cheating boyfriend Des or the micro-management of midwives. Kennedy emphasizes the natural bond between mother and child, and imbues that relationship with an almost mystical, magical air, describing colostrum as something "thick and sweet and full of mysterious antibodies" (112). Furthermore, the synchronous and climactic moment when Michelle's let-down reflex kicks just as her baby's eyes open up for the first time further underscores this bond.
Domesticity
Kennedy's stories tend to foreground domestic spaces. When she writes about non-domestic spaces (e.g. hospitals), she emphasizes their sterility or hostile nature or demonstrates how, in the right hands, these spaces can be nurturing and warm. An example of this domestication of non-domestic spaces is when the narrator of "Laminex and Mirrors" cleans the abandoned Menzies ward so well that she's later able to take Mr. Moreton there and draw him a hot bath. The collection also has plenty of explicitly domestic spaces, including the title story, "Like a House on Fire," which takes place—with the brief exceptions of the Christmas tree purchase and the narrator's description of his workplace injury—in the narrator and Claire's family home. When the narrator revises the idiom, "like a house on fire," to, "this is how you do it, I think, stick by careful stick over the ashes, oxygen and fuel, a controlled burn" (92), what he means by "it" is nurturing a relationship, raising a family, and navigating domestic life.
Commercialism and Capitalism
Commercial imagery and capitalism make subtle but significant contributions to the thematic makeup of this collection. In "Five-Dollar Family," when Michelle is surprised by the squished, red, alien-like features of her baby, she compares him to her expectations from "the photo on the baby-oil bottle ... a chubby little baby with bright rosy cheeks clapping its hands together" (96). Of course, it's easier to objectify that baby—she refers to it as "it"—versus her own, for whom she's bothered when nurses refer to him as "baby" instead of by his name, Jason. She also learns that Des is cheating on her when she finds a receipt, a kind of messenger of commerce.
In "Like a House on Fire," when the narrator destroys his wife's nativity scene, his daughter Evie replaces it with an improvised nativity scene using her dolls and toys:
Christmas designed by Disney and Mattel. Barbie is the Virgin Mary, Postman Pat has joined Ernie and Bert as stand-ins for the Three Wise Men. I count four shepards, only one of which is a panda, and take in the plastic farm collection and a squadron of My Little Ponies, a giantess Dora the Explorer who must be the angel—everything replaced except, in the middle of it all, the baby with the Napoleon kiss-curl... (83)
This nativity scene—which has every role replaced with some recognizable marker of pop culture except, significantly, for Jesus—demonstrates the extreme commercialization of childhood and domestic life; with regard to Christmas, Kennedy's point becomes even clearer. The nativity scene "designed by Disney and Mattel" reflects the commercialization of a religious holiday, a signifier that barely retains any trace of original signified—society still associates Jesus with Christmas, but all else falls to the wayside and is washed away in a tide of consumerism.
Community
In "Sleepers," Kennedy doubles down on her theme of capitalism and demonstrates how commercial "progress" interacts with and impedes community. The small town in which Ray lives is rattled by the sudden presence of developers. The story opens on a scene of traffic, which Kennedy is quick to point out is a rarity in this town. A sign blinking orange letters transmits messages to motorists: "TRACK UPGRADE, DELAYS EXPECTED ... DETOUR AHEAD."
"He'd forgotten," Kennedy writes. "They all had" (127). Kennedy packs a lot into that one word, "all," which signifies that this strange experience, traffic, i.e., the consequences of corporate development, are being felt by the entire community as a collective body. When the developers deny the community access to the redgum sleepers, which Ray's friends all agree are rightfully theirs, the community responds by variously "stealing back" the wood, devising different methods of undermining the developers' authority to take the wood for themselves. Ultimately, Ray is caught participating in this mass rebellion and serves as a "what was the word? An escape-goat?" (140), a person with whom the authorities can square their allegiance to law and order, which ultimately sides with the corporate interloper.
