The Big Fire
The novel begins a metaphorical image. An image of a big bang: little fires everywhere that serve to create one enormous inferno. How big a fire? It would be the talk of the town for the rest of the entire summer. In part, because the aftereffects of the fire would hang over the house in light of the misfit daughter everyone in town just naturally assumed was the arsonist:
“By a quarter after twelve there were four of them parked in a haphazard red line along Parkland Drive, where all six bedrooms of the Richardson house were ablaze, and everyone within a half mile could see the smoke rising over the trees like a dense black thundercloud.”
Rules Are Good, but…
Rules are good in the abstract. Life would be pure chaos and probably incapable of being lived at all without them. Even an ideological attraction to the authority imposed by rules is not necessarily bad in itself. Some people can take things too far, however, and in Shaker Heights that reality comes to the fore in metaphorical terms where adherence to rules is less problematic than the hyperbole of non-adherence:
“Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.”
The Warrens
The Warren family has recently settled in the Heights and it is not exactly what one would term a perfect fit. Into this carefully cultivated simulacrum of the concept of statistic perfection the family comprised of just mother and daughter sticks out. Even to a high school sophomore in the nineties:
“To Moody, this kind of existence was all but unfathomable. Watching the Warrens live was like watching a magic trick, as miraculous as transforming an empty soda can into a silver pitcher, or pulling a steaming pie from a silk top hat. No, he thought: it was like watching Robinson Crusoe conjure up a living out of nothingness. The more time he spent with Mia and Pearl, the more fascinated he became with them.”
Mrs. Richardson
Her name is Elena, but she is more often referred to as Mrs. Richardson by about a factor of six. She might as well be called Mrs. Shaker Heights because she embodies all its adherence to rules, order and careful planning. One might think this was simply because she had a good head on her shoulders, but the narrator knows better. The narrator knows that what seems to be on the surface is sometimes really a manifestation of fear rather than desire:
“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.”
Izzy
Many would argue, of course, but if only for a fractional minority, there is no question when it comes to the subject of who is the heroic figure in this story of the perverse form of authoritarianism that has a stranglehold on the population of Shaker Heights. Isabelle Marie Richardson—Izzy—is the kind of daughter who when her parents enroll her in dance class to improve her coordination sits down, refuses to move and writes “Not Your Puppet” across her forehead just before the big recital. One gets the feeling that if Izzy ever crossed paths with Holden Caulfield, she’d kick his whiny little butt. For, as the narrator metaphorically put it:
“Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest.”
