Title: Everything I Never Told You Author: Celeste Ng
Published: June 26, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 292
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.
So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.
A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
Celeste Ng begins by telling us that Lydia is dead, and then Everything I Never Told You goes on to explain why. This book is a layered, nuanced look at a family and the different personalities that comprise it, an examination of how each individual influences and affects the others. I found the end product to be fascinating, complex, and starkly revealing—with just a hint of that feeling in your gut that tells you a story is hitting home.
It would have been easy, and perhaps a bit more “literary”, for Ng to have left the reasons for Lydia’s death kept from the reader. This could have been a book about how a death affects a family, and while it is that, Everything I Never Told You is at the same time a book about how a family affects a death. The novel shows us what happens after Lydia’s funeral, but it also examines what necessitated that casket—going, in some cases, decades back into her parents’ childhoods. What results is a complete portrait of the Lee family’s psychology, with all its flaws, good intentions, and misunderstandings.
I suppose what stood out most in the book was James and Marilyn Lee’s parenting. It doesn’t do to cast blame, but the text seems to make the case that Lydia’s parents more or less caused her death by the very loving, well-meant pressure and expectations they placed on their child. James Lee is Chinese-American, and has spent much of his life wanting to blend in. Marilyn Lee, a white woman, had dreams of being a doctor and being exceptional. Upon Lydia, these two conflicting desires merge: James urging his daughter to be popular and make friends while Marilyn pushes her daughter into becoming the doctor she could never have been. By any standard, the Lees were good parents, but even the best parents aren’t perfect, and Ng hones in on this truth with startling accuracy. Because Everything I Never Told You is narrated by a more or less omniscient outside narrator, the reader comes to understand each of the three Lee children and how their parent’s own fears and goals have shaped them. Lydia, her parents’ favorite, is placed in an unwanted and increasingly harsh spotlight while her older brother and younger sister are, if not quite ignored, certainly not given equal attention.
The element of race comes into play here as well, and in important ways. Early on in the book, it’s noted that Lydia had more stereotypically “White” features than either of her siblings, i.e. blue eyes. This makes James, self-conscious about his race, happy, more certain that this daughter will do what he cannot: fit in. But Lydia, and the rest of her family, don’t fit into their small Ohio college town, and this is in large part due to race. Celeste Ng weaves this theme throughout the narrative, displaying the ways it affects each member of the family, how it changes their relationships with others. What Everything I Never Told You demonstrates is that even if race isn’t at the forefront of an issue, it’s always there, shaping perspectives and changing experiences. This may not be a book strictly about”being a Chinese-American,” but neither is that subject unimportant to Ng’s narrative.
All told, I wouldn’t classify this as a pleasant book, or one that’s fun to read. Probably not even enjoyable. It is, however, strongly-written, and the way Celeste Ng was able to pierce the Lee family’s reality so accurately and precisely was almost startling in its truthfulness. What Everything I Never Told You does is speak honestly about a family and their situation, and it does so in a way that affects and touches the reader who is, presumably, not a Chinese-American living in small-town Ohio in the 1970s. That certainly allows me to consider this a successful novel, if not an “enjoyable” one.
