Elena Richardson’s Plan
Mrs. Richardson is the character who most reflects the desire to impose control through order in a way that mirrors the town of Shaker Heights. She has learned from the city’s rules and pressed them into her philosophy. In a moment of reflection upon her philosophical guide to life, the ironic connection to the novel’s opening scene—her house burned to cinders—is impossible to ignore:
“All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze…the key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.”
Guilty by Suspicion
Right there in the very first paragraph, a whole bunch happens: the Richardson family home burns down and youngest sibling Izzy is fingered as the suspected culprit. The descriptive term “little lunatic” is one that would be considered prejudicial in the courtroom. Smack dab in the middle of the opening paragraph, the reader is enticed to join in the suspicion that Izzy Richardson is guilty of having burned down her own house in an explosion of lunacy that was only waiting for its time to come. And then arrives the twist in which the profoundly deep irony contained within cannot possibly be appreciated until the reader has moved far enough into the story to realize that the narrator’s observation has absolutely no basis of application to Izzy by anyone in Shaker Heights, not even her siblings:
“By then, of course, Izzy would be long gone, leaving no one to defend her, and people could—and did—say whatever they liked.”
Lexie’s Boyfriend Is a Jerk
There’s no getting around it. Brian is a jerk. Plain and simple. He makes it known he wouldn’t be sticking around if she got pregnant and then proceeds to get her pregnant. Bad enough, but in a display of pathetically ironic jerkdom, he then goes on to weigh in—such as the undeveloped brain of Brian can do so—on the custody battle between Bebe Chow and the McCulloughs”
“I mean, use a condom. How hard is that? A buck at the drugstore and this whole thing would never have happened.”
Elena’s Calculus Disability
Elena Richardson has a math disability. Specifically, she cannot do simple calculus or, perhaps, one should say that she applies calculus too simplistically. Before her daughter Izzy burns down her home and changes the topic of gossip in town, the number one subject for months had been the custody battle between Bebe Chow’s biological claim to her daughter and the white McCullough family fighting in court to adopt the abandoned infant.
“For her it was simple: Bebe Chow had been a poor mother; Linda McCullough had been a good one. One had followed the rules, and one had not.”
The irony of this calculus, of course, is that ignores the fact that rules are neither objectively good or bad and thus following them carries no objective rightness or wrongness. For Elena, the simple act of following the rules of Shaker Heights makes you good. By that line of reasoning so would following the rules of 1936 Germany because her calculation is based only on following rules, not whether those rules are themselves worthy of being followed or not.
The 100th Bomb Group
The 100th Bomb Group is a very real and very famous restaurant in Cleveland. It is a theme restaurant in which everything is about celebrating the World War II squadron that saved the world from the fascism of the Nazis. Mrs. Richardson treats Lexie, Izzy and Pearl to lunch there ostensibly to celebrate Lexie’s being accepted into Yale. In reality, she will proceed to go about interrogating Pearl with a subtle brilliance that gains exactly the information she desires in order to find out the secrets of Pearl’s mother in a way that the Gestapo could only dream of replicating.
