Prairie Fires
Mia becomes an enormous influence upon the already rebellious Izzy, primarily in the form of directing and channeling that energy. At one point, Mia tells Izzy about a time in Nebraska when she witnessed the devastating effects of a prairie fire which left everything scorched and turned every last inch of green black. In time, however, the green would not only return, but the entire prairie would become more fertile and new growth make the results of the fire impossible even to imagine. This image is certified as symbolic when Mia later explains how it is representative of the fact that sometimes change requires burning everything down and completely starting over from scratch. It’s meant metaphorically, of course, but, hey, Izzy plays by Izzy’s rules.
Names
Names becomes highly symbolic in the novel as insight into how the ideological philosophy of the rules of Shaker Heights infiltrate the consciousness of its citizens. Elena Richardson is the personification of the adherence to rules and order in the Heights and as a result is almost always addressed as Mrs. Richardson. Her rebellious daughter Isabelle Marie, on the other hand, has adopted a name typically associated with males: Izzy. Pearl was named by her single-mother Mia after Hester Prynne’s illegitimate child in The Scarlet Letter while the Chinese foundling a white Shaker Heights family want to adopt undergoes a particularly extreme form of Anglicized name change: May Ling Chow becomes Mirabelle McCullough.
Jerry Springer
More specifically, The Jerry Springer Show. The novel is set in the 1990’s when the collapse of certain censorship restrictions and the wholesale change of afternoon television programming from rerun-based to talk-show dense brought something into family living rooms never seen before: a daily parade of the world’s worst in humanity struggling to top the degradation aired the day before. The Richardson kids are addicted to Springer’s demonstration of uncontrolled humanity appearing under topics like “I’m Having Your Husband’s Baby!” in a way that transforms the show from mere spectacle into a symbol of the unplanned, uncontrolled, and disordered universe outside the boundaries of Shaker Heights.
Mia’s Photographs
Mia is a photographer, but not merely of the point and click variety. Her images are truly a work of art, requiring intricate hands-on multimedia presentations. What they present—especially those she leaves behind for each member of the Richardson family—are a particularly idiosyncratic form of metaphysical self-portraiture. Not self-portraits in the sense of a “selfie” but in the sense of being a psychological “selfie” in which a secret inner truth known to the subject is revealed in the image in a way that can be only be truly understood by the subject..and the photographer. The images are symbols of the reality hiding behind the façade of the individuals which are in turn symbolic of the façade of perfection hiding the flawed reality of Shaker Heights.
Shaker Heights
The motto of the real-life town in which the story is set is “Most communities just happen; the best are planned.” The Heights was a carefully planned community of such fame it was featured in an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine in the 1960’s. It has managed to maintain much of its original features through strict implementation of rigidly constructed rules. The city becomes of how authority is disguised as order and how order is a mere illusion in the face of the chaos of reality.
