Little Fires Everywhere was named the best novel of 2017 by the editors of Amazon as well as by the good folks at Goodreads. In reviews featured on both those web sites as well as those published in various newspapers and periodicals, the book is highly praised for its treatment of “liberal racism,” mother/daughter relationships, the tension between the rights of adoptive parents and the biological mother, and the general weirdness of overly ordered planned communities like Shaker Heights. Admittedly, all those topics are treated with sensitivity and complexity by the author, but it is also true that each subject has been addressed before. (Check out the X-Files episode “Arcadia” for a particularly effective spin on the Shaker Heights-related theme.) What really makes Little Fires Everywhere one of the standout novels of not just 2017, but of the entire century so far is the latest introduction to that short but impressive list of idiosyncratically memorable teenage anti-heroes. And what makes this accomplishment all the more impressive is that in this Age of Superheroes, the anti-hero has at times seemed to have gone extinct.
Isabelle Marie Richardson wrote NOT YOUR PUPPET across her forehead with a Sharpie to send a message to her parents about being forced to take dance classes, and—oh yeah—is introduced in the first paragraph as the likely arsonist responsible for setting little fires everywhere which resulted in the total destruction of her family’s upper middle class home. That’s just for starters. By the end of the novel, Izzy—and for god’s sake don’t call her anything else—has rightfully earned her place alongside Holden Caulfield and Mary Katherine Blackwood—and for god’s sake, just call her Merricat—as one of American literature’s greatest portrayals of teenage angst. Where does Izzy fit into this pantheon? Right in the middle—she moves beyond being merely a torpid whiner like Holden but stops just short of being the psychopath which Merricat offhandedly admits to in her narration of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Of course, Izzy has one thing which neither Holden nor Merricat were lucky enough to find: a mentorship in radicalism. In one of the most sentences in recent fiction, the narrator describes the youngest of the Richardson children thusly: “Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest.” Already primed by the oppressive authoritarian imposition of rules covering everything right down to the narrow list of shades of cream which could be used on the plaster of the Tudor houses in Shaker Heights, Izzy was almost born to become a rebel. Kudos must be sent to the author for having the creativity to break with tradition by making the rebel of the family not the middle child, but the baby. The last child in a big family is almost never allowed to become the rebel, but the backstory makes clear that Izzy was destined in the womb to become a problem child. And yet—she isn’t a problem child. She’s not a druggie or a petty criminal looking to break into the big time.
She’s a radical. She is for much of her life, painful as it may be to write these words, a rebel without a case. And then one day some newcomers settle in the Heights. If you shake Shaker Heights, most of what drops to the ground does not look like Mia Warren. Izzy—almost always the first member of her family to notice things gone unnoticed by the rest of town—recognizes a kindred spirit in Mia and the two bond closely that some valuable information can be imparted to the member of the Richardson family that her siblings have deemed most likely to wind up one day on The Jerry Springer Show. In a book overflowing with significant conversation, perhaps none is more essential than that which ends with Mia telling Izzy:
“Remember what I said the other day? About the prairie fires? About how sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over? Well…Just remember that. Sometimes you need to start over from scratch. Can you understand that?”
In response, Izzy nods, but inside she wonders if she really does. The opening scene of the book indicates that perhaps she takes her mentor’s advice a little too literally, but then again maybe not. Little Fires Everywhere ends right back at the place where it started: the Richardson home has burned to the ground, Izzy is nowhere to be seen, everybody naturally suspects she’s the arsonist (she is) and the police, her mother thinks to herself, will find her missing baby. And if they don’t, it doesn’t really matter because she will never stop looking herself and no matter how many years it might take, she will continue searching until Izzy is found and returned to her. It is a sadly ironic because by that point the reader knows that the likelihood of Izzy ever returning to her mother in any form but the physical is the epitome of unlikely. Izzy has set little fires everywhere not as an act of lunacy or hooliganism or criminal intent, but as radical activism pointedly directed against her family. Even if she is found and returned, Izzy is gone forever. Just like Holden and Merricat.
