以下为《Little Fires Everywhere》
第二期解读版音频内容
以下为音频正文和解读
Episode 2（n.插曲；一段情节；插话；有趣的事件）
Introduction to Episode 2
Welcome back to ThinkTank Learning’s Book Club ! My name is Carine, and I will be your host as we explore great literature together.
This is Episode 2 of our series, in which we are reading and discussing Celeste Ng’s award-winning novel, Little Fires Everywhere. Before we begin, let’s refresh our memories about some of the important plot developments from Chapters 1 through 4 of the novel.
Quick Summary of Episode 1
The entire novel is put together as a flashback about the events leading up to the destruction of the Richardson family home in the affluent (or very wealthy) suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. As Mrs. Richardson stands on the front lawn in disbelief, the firefighters put out the remaining flames, and the neighbors gossip, we are introduced to the Richardson teenagers: Lexile, Trip, and Moody. The youngest Richardson, Izzy, is missing, and her three siblings are certain that she purposely set the house on fire, as the firefighters have noticed that there were little fires everywhere fueled by an accelerant（n. 促进剂；触媒。adj. 促进的；加速的；催速的）, or a substance used to help spread a fire more quickly and powerfully.
The novel then flashes back to the previous summer, when two new inhabitants moved to Shaker Heights and rented a small duplex from Mrs. Richardson. The free-spirited artist Mia Warren and her shy, intelligent teenage daughter Pearl are vastly different from the other residents of the highly organized, traditional-minded Shaker Heights. The Warrens attract both Mrs. Richardson and her son Moody. Mrs. Richardson is touched to see Mia want the best for Pearl’s education. Moody, meanwhile, becomes infatuated with（迷恋） Pearl for her independence, intelligence, and artistic nature. In an effort to keep her attention, Moody shows Pearl around Shaker Heights and eventually introduces her to his family when he feels she is getting restless. Pearl, for her part, is strongly attracted to the Richardson family and their predictable, orderly way of life. She looks up to Lexie and Trip Richardson, who seem to embody beauty, popularity, and supreme self-confidence. Soon, Pearl spends every day at the Richardson’s house, and when she goes home, she talks about the Richardsons non-stop.
Mia Warren is torn over her daughter’s newfound friends. On the one hand, Mia is happy that Pearl is finally settling down and connecting with others. On the other hand, Mia worries that the Richardsons might have too much power over Pearl. Ultimately, Mia decides to remain silent, but this does not stop her from worrying.
After Lexie Richardson makes an insensitive remark about Pearl’s unknown and absent father, Pearl goes home and asks Mia if she was “wanted” by her or if she were a regrettable accident. Much to Pearl’s bewilderment（n. 困惑；迷乱；慌张）, Mia becomes noticeably upset. Mia stresses that she wanted Pearl very much than quickly leaving the room. Pearl is bothered by this turn of events and the heavy secret that her mother appears to be keeping from her.
Thus, Chapters 1 through 4 of Little Fires Everywhere have established a central tension of the novel: the fascination and the fear that the Richardsons and Warrens feel toward each other’s way of life. Let’s now explore how this conflict is developed over the course of Chapters 5 through 9, which will be the focus of today’s episode.
Chapter 5
In this chapter, Lexie Richardson decides to take Pearl under her wing to help her become more fashionable and confident. Lexie’s decision is prompted partly out of pity for “Little Orphan Pearl.” It is also motivated by Lexie’s fascination that someone could be so completely “timid and quiet, so unsure of herself”, or so completely opposite to Lexie. Celeste Ng writes：
It was natural, she had felt, that Pearl would turn to her for advice; Lexie was used to people wanting her opinion, to the point where she often assumed they did and just hadn’t quite said so...The second time Pearl had come over, Moody had left her in the sunroom and gone to get drinks, and Pearl, instead of sitting down, had turned in a slow circle, as if she were in Oz（Land of Oz 绿野仙踪） instead of the Richardsons’ house. Lexie, who had been coming down the hall with the latest Cosmo and a Diet Coke in hand, had stopped outside the doorway, just out of view, and watched her. Then Pearl had reached out one timid finger and traced a vine in the wallpaper, and Lexie had felt a warm gush of pity for her, the sad little mouse...Something occurred to her, a good deed that she might do. “Hey Pearl, you can have [this magazine] when I’m done,” she said, and felt the fuzzy（adj. 模糊的；失真的；有绒毛的） internal glow of teenage generosity.
That is only the beginning of course. Lexie takes Pearl on a shopping trip to Shaker Height’s upscale mall（高档购物中心）. Pearl is very conscious of the fact that she does not have enough money to buy anything, so she takes Lexie to visit the more familiar thrift store（二手店）. Lexie is delighted by the “vintage” clothing, and Pearl is happy to show Lexie how to get the best prices. Lexie returns the favor:
Lexie let a spoonful of chocolate melt against her tongue. “You know what?” she said,
half closing her eyes, as if to put Pearl in sharper focus. “That skirt would go great with a striped button-down. I’ve got an old one you can have.” When they got back to her house, she pulled a half dozen shirts from the closet. “See?” she said, smoothing the collar around Pearl’s neck, carefully buttoning a single button between her breasts for the minimum of modesty, the way all the senior girls were wearing them that year. She swiveled Pearl toward the mirror and nodded approvingly. “You can take those,” she said. “They look cute on you. I’ve got too many clothes as it is.”
Pearl’s new clothes and more provocative（n. 刺激物，挑拨物；兴奋剂。adj. 刺激的，挑拨的；气人的） fashion sense surprise both Mia Warren and Trip Richardson, but for vastly different reasons. Although Pearl lies and says that the clothes are from the thrift store, Mia can sense the truth and is uneasy about how Pearl is becoming more like the wealthy Richardsons, who value social status and possessions. Celeste Ng writes,
Mia, noticed that the shirts smelled of Tide and perfume rather than dust, that they were crisp, as if they’d been ironed. But she said nothing, and the following evening all of Pearl’s new clothes appeared in a neat pile at the foot of her bed, and Pearl breathed a sigh of relief.
Now that Pearl is dressing more like the popular girls in Shaker Heights, Trip, the handsome athlete, suddenly notices that Pearl is quite attractive. Trip’s reaction to Pearl causes Moody to become jealous. Celeste Ng writes,
A few days later, in the Richardsons’ kitchen and clad in one of Lexie’s shirts, she noticed Trip looking at her again and again out of the corner of his eye and adjusted her collar with a smug little smile. Trip himself was not even aware of why he was glancing at her, but he could not help noticing the little hourglass of skin her shirt revealed: the bare triangle framed by her collarbones（锁骨）; the bare triangle of midriff, with the delicate indent of her navel; the intermittent flash of navy blue bra above and below that single fastened button.
“You look nice today,” he said, as if he were noticing her for the first time, and Pearl turned a deep pink, right down to the roots of her hair. He seemed embarrassed, too, as if he had just revealed a fondness for a very uncool TV Show.
Moody could not let this pass. “She always looks nice,” he said. “Shut up, Trip.”
As usual, however, Trip did not notice his brother’s irritation. “I mean extra nice,” he said. “That shirt suits you. Brings out the color of your eyes.”
“It’s Lexie’s,” Pearl blurted out, and Trip grinned. “Looks better on you,” he said, almost shyly, and headed outside.
The next day, Moody raided his savings and presented Pearl with a notebook, a slim black Moleskine held shut with an elastic garter. “Hemingway used this exact same kind,” he told her, and Pearl thanked him and zipped it into her bookbag. She would copy her poems into it, he thought, instead of that ratty old spiral notebook, and it gave him some comfort--when she smiled at Trip or blushed at his compliments--to know that he had given her the notebook that was holding her favorite words and thoughts.
Moody’s jealousy increases when his sister Lexie also begins to seek out Pearl’s company. Mia, like Moody, is also unhappy about Pearl’s new friendships. Mia values her privacy and feels uneasy when Lexie and Moody start to come home with Pearl sometimes. Mia is not sure if she likes the Richardsons’ suburban influence on Pearl, and so she is nervous about the Richardsons becoming too close.
One afternoon at Pearl’s house, Lexie shares how she is stressed out about her college application essay for Yale. Lexie, it turns out, is very intelligent, as she is among the top students of her class. However, her worldview and goals for the future are narrowly defined by Shaker Heights. Celeste Ng writes,
For Lexie...her mother had grown up in Shaker and had never gone far--just
Down to Denison for her undergrad before boomeranging back. Her father had come from a small town in Indiana and, once he’d met her mother at college, simply stayed, moving back with her to her hometown, finishing a JD at Case Western, working his way up from a junior associate to partner at one of the biggest firms in the city. But Lexie, like most of her classmates, had no desire to stay anywhere near Cleveland.
The application essay for Yale is confusing to Lexie because it requires her to do a piece of creative writing: she must retell a famous story from a different perspective. Lexie would much prefer a traditional informational or argumentative essay. As Moody and Pearl throw out suggestions to her, the teenagers begin to talk about how they would retell the story of Rumpelstiltskin（侏儒怪：德国民间故事中的侏儒状妖怪）. In this tale, an evil fairy named Rumpelstiltskin promises to help a poor girl avoid death and marry the king if and only if she gives him her first-born child. The girl agrees, only to realize later on that she does not want to give up her baby to the fairy. The girl tricks Rumpelstiltskin, keeps her baby, and lives happily ever after. While thinking about how to change the story, Lexie suggests that the girl was actually the villain（n. 坏人，恶棍；戏剧、小说中的反派角色；顽童；罪犯） because she was willing to give up her child in the first place. Mia, who has been listening quietly to the teenagers’ conversation, suddenly becomes irritated. Celeste Ng writes,
“Well,” Mia put in suddenly. She turned around, the bowl of popcorn in her hands, and all three of [the teenagers] jumped, as if a piece of furniture had begun to speak. “Maybe she didn’t know what she was giving up until afterward. Maybe once she saw the baby she changed her mind.” She set the bowl down in the center of the table. “Don’t be so quick to judge, Lexie.”
To make amends for his mother’s behavior, Pearl volunteers to write Lexie’s college application essay for her, saying that she is good at writing stories. Lexie happily accepts, while Moody and Mia say nothing in silent irritation, or annoyed anger. Thus, Chapter 5 ends as tensions rise. Moody is jealous of his family’s influence over Pearl, while Mia’s strong emotional reactions hint at a deep secret that even her own daughter does not know.
Chapter 6
The following week, Pearl presents Lexie with the neatly typed up essay for her college application to Yale. Lexie, full of gratitude, decides to invite Pearl to a very exclusive Halloween party hosted by Stacie Perry, one of the most popular girls in school. Pearl sees this as an opportunity to meet more people and perhaps get closer to her crush Trip Richardson, who is also going to the party.
Moody, of course, has not been invited to the party, and he is annoyed that Pearl would rather go to the party instead of hang out with him. In fact, he and Pearl’s mother are increasingly uncomfortable about Lexie’s influence on Pearl. Mentored by the eldest Richardson, Pearl now dresses in more revealing clothing and is experimenting with makeup and jewelry. Moody’s apprehension and Mia’s protectiveness are heartbreakingly illustrated, as Celeste Ng writes,
Pearl would emerge from her room wearing one of Lexie’s button-downs, or a spaghetti-strap tank, or dark red lipstick. “Lexie gave it to me,” she explained, half to her mother and half to Moody, both of whom were starting at her in dismay. “She said it was too dark for her, but that it looked good on me. Because my hair’s darker.” Under the smudge（n. 污点，污迹；烟熏火堆） of lipstick, her lips looked like a bruise, tender and raw.
“Wash that off,” Mia said, for the first time ever. But the next morning Pearl came out wearing one of Lexie’s chokers, which looked like a gash of black lace at her neck.
“See you at dinner,” she said. “Lexie and I are going shopping after school.”
Stacie Perry’s Halloween costume party represents an exciting opportunity for Pearl, a chance to be initiated into the excitement of adolescence（n. 青春期） and all of its possibilities. It is described as something straight out of an American teen movie from the 90’s. Celeste Ng writes,
It was the most surreal（adj. 超现实主义的；离奇的；不真实的） night Pearl had ever experienced. All evening,
cars driven by skateboarders and animals and Freddy Kruegers pulled up to park at the edges of Stacie’s huge lawn. At least four boys wore Scream masks; a couple donned football jerseys and helmets; a creative few wore long jackets and fedoras and sunglasses and feather boas (“Pimps,” Lexie explained.) Most of the girls wore skimpy dresses and hats or animal ears, though one had transformed herself into Princess Leia; another, dressed as a fembot, hung on the arms of an Austin Powers. Stacie herself was dressed as an angel, in a silvery spaghetti-strapped minidress, glittery wings and fishnets, and a halo on a headband.
By the time Lexie and Serena and Pearl arrived at nine thirty, everyone was
already drunk. The air was thick with sweat and the sharp sour smell of beer, and couples dry humped in darkened corners. The kitchen floor was sticky with spilled drinks, and some girl was lying flat on her back on the table among half-empty liquor bottles, smoking a joint and giggling as a boy licked rum from her navel. Lexie and Serena poured themselves drinks and wriggled（vi. 蠕动；蜿蜒而行；vt. 使蠕动；蠕动到；不知不觉地潜入；n. 蠕动；扭动） into the makeshift dance floor（临时搭建的舞池）in the living room. Pearl, left alone, stood in the corner of the kitchen, nursing a red Solo cup full of Stoli and Coke and looking for Trip.
The party takes very different directions for Lexie and Pearl. Lexie’s boyfriend, Brian, surprises her by arriving after he finished mailing his last-minute application to Princeton. Lexie and Brian decide to take a big step that night. Celeste Ng writes,
The dancing and the liquor and the sweet, heady rush of being eighteen had
filled them both with a feverish flush. In the time they’d been dating, they’d done some stuff, as Lexie had coyly put it to Serena, but it, the big it, had sat between them for a while, like a deep pool of water in which they only dipped their toes. Now, pressed against Brian, mellowed by rum and Coke, music pounding through both their bodies like a shared heartbeat, she was filled with the sudden longing to plunge into that pool and dive straight to the bottom....”Want to go for a drive?” she asked. Both of them knew what she was suggesting. Without speaking, they hurried out to the curb, where Lexie’s car was waiting.
In contrast, Pearl remains alone in the kitchen, waiting to see Trip and make her move. He never appears though, and Pearl begins to feel anxious as the party gets more and more out of control. She cannot find Lexie or Serena, and she is unable to remember how to get home. So, Pearl calls her only remaining friend--Moody--to ask for a ride home. Pearl feels, as Celeste Ng eloquently puts it, “recently singed,” or lightly burned by fire. For his part, Moody feels jealous and resentful（adj. 充满忿恨的；厌恶的）, while Mia feels disappointed and worried. Celeste Ng writes,
Despite Pearl’s insistence that her mother wouldn’t mind, Mia minded her
lateness very much. When Pearl finally came upstairs--smelling of smoke and alcohol and something Mia was fairly certain was weed--she had not known what to say. “Go to bed,” she had finally managed. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” Morning had come, Pearl had slept in, and even when she finally emerged near noon, disheveled and sandy eyed, Mia still hadn’t known what to say. You wanted Pearl to have a more normal life, she reminded herself; well, this is what teens do. Part of her felt she should be more involved--that she needed to know what Pearl was up to, what Lexie was up to, what all of them were up to--but what was she to do? She’d ended up saying nothing, and Pearl had consumed a bowl of cereal in silence and returned to bed.
One day, Mrs. Richardson stops by the duplex that she is renting out to Mia and Pearl Warren. Mrs. Richardson states that she wants to make sure that they’re comfortably settled in, but she seems to be observing all the mismatched furniture and brightly painted walls.Mrs. Richardson is particularly struck by Mia’s photographs, and their discussion about photography, business, and art reveals much about their vastly different philosophies. Celeste Ng writes,
Mrs. Richardson peered closely at a photo of a sullen（adj. 愠怒的，不高兴的；天气阴沉的；沉闷的） young girl in a cowgirl outfit. Mia had snapped it at a parade they’d passed on the way into Ohio. “You have such a gift for portraiture,” she said. “Look at the way you’ve captured this little girl. Youcan almost see right down into her soul.”
Mia said nothing but nodded in a way that Mrs Richardson decided was modesty.
“You should take portraits professionally,” Mrs. Richardson suggested. She
paused. “Not that you’re not a professional already, of course. But in a studio maybe. Or
for weddings and engagements. You’d be very highly sought after.” She waved a hand at the photographs on the wall, as if they could articulate what she meant. “In fact, perhaps you could take portraits of our family. I’d pay you of course.”
“Perhaps,” Mia said. “But the thing about portraits is, you need to show people the way they want to be seen. And I prefer to show people as I see them. So in the end I’d probably frustrate us both.” She smiled placidly, and Mrs. Richardson fumbled（vt. 摸索；笨拙地做；漏接；vi. 摸索；笨拙地行动；漏球；n. 摸索；笨拙的处理；漏球） for a response.
Mia is clearly motivated by something other than money or social approval, something that perplexes（vt. 使困惑，使为难；使复杂化） Mrs. Richardson. Celeste Ng writes,
Mrs. Richardson had, her entire existence, lived an orderly and regimented life...She had been brought up to follow rules, to believe that the proper functioning of the world depended on her compliance, and follow them--and believe--she did. She had had a plan, from girlhood on, and had followed it scrupulously: high school, college, boyfriend, marriage, job, mortgage, children...She had, in short, done everything right and she had built a good life, the kind of life she wanted, the kind of life everyone wanted. Now here was this Mia, a completely different kind of woman leading a completely different life, who seemed to make her own rules...Mrs. Richardson found this perturbing（v. 扰乱；使心慌） but strangely compelling. A part of her wanted to study Mia like an anthropologist, to understand why--and how--she did what she did. Another part of her--though she was only vaguely aware of it at the moment--was uneasy, wanted to keep an eye on Mia, as you might keep your eye on a dangerous beast.
Mrs. Richardson, caught up in the notion of doing good deeds, offers Mia a part-time job to clean and cook dinner at their house. Mia is tempted to refuse, as she believes her daughter would be embarrassed and she already makes just enough money to get by as a waitress at the local restaurant. However, Mia finally accepts the offer when she realizes that she can keep a closer eye on Pearl. Thus, the Warren and the Richardson families draw closer together despite misgivings（n. 疑虑，担忧） on both sides.
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