Title: Nobody Is Ever Missing Author: Catherine Lacey
Published: July 8, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 244
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.
Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?
The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self. In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.
On the sixth anniversary of her sister’s suicide, Elyria boards a flight to New Zealand, leaving behind her unsuspecting husband in New York. Her goals are uncertain—not even Elyria truly understands why she’s leaving. To be alone, to get away, to find herself. Regardless, she spends several months hitchhiking in New Zealand, struggling to come to terms with whatever it is she has to come to terms with.
The thing with Nobody Is Ever Missing is that it doesn’t give readers answers. Lacey just allows her protagonist to speak, and just as Elyria doesn’t understand herself, neither does the reader, in some ways. This gives the novel a realistic, almost stream-of-consciousness edge to it that I didn’t necessarily love, but did think was a good fit for the type of story Lacey is trying to tell here.
In terms of characters, I didn’t exactly care for or understand any of the people in this book. Elyria’s husband is an outright jackhole, but I’m not sure I loved Elyria herself. Her mental journey throughout the book is interesting and well-done, and thought the conclusion is extremely open-ended, there was a point about three-fourths of the way through where I felt Lacey had come to her “point” so to speak:
I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself.
So, all in all, Nobody Is Ever Missing was a good book that’s well-written and interesting; however, it didn’t do much for me. This more cerebral, vague type of literary fiction is often not my cup of tea, and while I think Catherine Lacey did an excellent job, I wasn’t particularly moved by Elyria or her journey over the course of the book.
