“The firemen said there were little fires everywhere. Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.”
The title of the novel is referenced here in respect to the blaze which opens the book. The home of the Richardson family has been destroyed in an inferno and Lexie—the eldest of the children—is describing what she’s heard from the first responders. Lexie is bright and sensitive and would naturally be the one to find out this information and report it to the family. Lexie has three siblings and suspicion has fallen squarely upon the shoulders of the youngest—though he is old enough to attend high school—Izzy. Lending further credence to this suspicion is that Izzy has fled the coop. Why and to where remains a mystery at this early point.
“Actually, though, all things considered, people from Shaker Heights are basically pretty much like people everywhere else in America. They may have three or four cars instead of one or two, and they may have two television sets instead of one, and when a Shaker Heights girl gets married she may have a reception for eight hundred, with the Meyer Davis band flown in from New York, instead of a wedding reception for a hundred with a local band, but these are all differences of degree rather than fundamental differences.”
The setting of a novel is not always of genuinely intrinsic significance. Some very memorable and well-told stories could have been set in just about any other relatively similar location. In this novel, setting is paramount. The above quote is an epigraph which occurs before the narrative beings. It is an excerpt from an actual article published in the March 1963 edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine titled “The Good Life in Shaker Heights.” The novel takes place considerably after the publication of that article—Jerry Springer is a popular TV show and the Spice Girls are a super-hot music act—but the fundamental consciousness of the community expressed here as well as the somewhat ironic tone adopted by the writer haven’t exactly expressed that passage of time.
Shaker Heights was like that. There were rules, many rules, about what you could and could not do… an unmowed lawn would result in a polite but stern letter from the city, noting that their grass was over six inches tall and that if the situation was not rectified, the city would mow the grass…rules governing what colors a house could be painted, for example. A helpful chart from the city categorized every home as a Tudor, English, or French style and laid out the appropriate colors for architects and homeowners alike…
In an episode of The X-Files titled “Arcadia,” agents Mulder and Scully go undercover as an upper-middle-class husband and wife (named Rob and Laura Petrie!) to investigate some strange events going on in a planned housing community defined by its draconian institution of seemingly arbitrary rules which, if violated, result in punishment well beyond the norm. In many ways, the major players who run this housing community rank among the most terrifying threats the agents ever face.
To a certain degree, Shaker Heights is like that, at least in the way the author presents it. And yet, at the same time, no matter how creepy, intrusive and authoritarian one may be find that presentation, one can also understand exactly why others would find it so appealing. Izzy Richardson represents the type of person who would watch “Arcadia” and would it horrifying; he is rebellious and feels the constraints and restrictions of imposition of external authority very deeply.
(It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love?)
Shaker Heights is obsessed with the imposition of order as a means of manifesting an appearance. That appearance is one of normality. A close-cut lawn provides the appearance of a normal resident living inside even if that person is otherwise a raving lunatic. A suburban block populated with five Tudor houses all painted in “acceptable” colors gives the appearance of the neighborhood being normal. If one of those Tudor homes featured bright pink shutters and an orange roof, it would obviously be a clarion call that someone not normal lives there with the offshoot being, of course, calling into question all the other residents in any neighborhood which would accept such a deviation from normal. The problem with this state of mind is not so much any inherent wrongness in wanting to be appear normal. That is a perfectly rational expectation. The problem is who decides what is “normal” and, even more to the point, why that decision was made. This question of what is normal and what is not is at the crux of the storyline which unfolds in the book.
