Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing: A Novel, FSG Originals, 2014.
excerpt
www.catherinelacey.com/
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.
Lacey’s debut novel has emotional power, depth, and subtle humor. The protagonist, Elyria, makes the impulsive decision to leave her luxurious New York City apartment, her husband, her job as a scriptwriter for soap operas, and, most importantly, the charade of happiness she has kept up since her sister’s suicide. Elyria decides to take a trip to New Zealand, after going to a party and meeting Werner, a successful novelist who said she could stay at his cottage there. She arrives and hitchhikes to Werner’s home, along the way meeting Jaye, a transgendered female flight attendant, and Judas, who resembles a character from “a porno or slasher movie,” among others. At Werner’s cottage, Elyria is content to lead a largely isolated existence, repaying her host’s generosity by tending his garden, but eventually Werner tires of her and she has to move on. Lacey rejects the typical dramatic trajectory of a self-discovery story. Instead, she keenly constructs a believable universe composed not of disasters or miracles, but of choices and consequences. - Publishers Weekly
Elyria Riley buys a one-way ticket to New Zealand, leaving her husband without warning or explanation, in Lacey’s debut novel.
Elyria, a soap-opera writer, is no stranger to the emotional drama that can permeate daily life. She's haunted by memories of Ruby, her adopted sister, who committed suicide by jumping out a window. It was through this traumatic event that Elyria first met Charles, a mathematics professor; Ruby was his teaching assistant, and he bonded with Elyria over their common experiences of loss. As she dryly puts it, “[a]nother terrible thing was how I met my husband.” Death forms the foundation of their marriage until the day Elyria leaves Charles behind and goes to New Zealand. Her life becomes a series of hitchhiked rides, strange encounters and odd jobs. The plot would be worthy of a soap opera if not for Elyria’s distinctive self-awareness and critical voice. She's a cold, distant observer of her own feelings and actions. Early on, this voice pulls the reader in and provides moments of great insight and wit. “[T]o love someone,” she states, “is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first.” But as Elyria moves from job to job, from place to place, relying on the kindness of strangers she's quick to abandon, she exhausts the reader’s sympathies. As a narrator, she grows both less relatable and less reliable until the plot reaches its inevitable conclusion. Elyria is the last to realize that what she's trying to escape, after all, is herself.
A travel story that's missing an emotional journey. - Kirkus Reviews
"Ms. Lacey has written a serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction. It's the most promising first novel that I've encountered this year." —Sam Sacks
"The premise begins simply enough: Elyria has unexpectedly left her husband. And yet the proceeding narrative introduces some of contemporary fiction’s most complex personal introspection as Catherine Lacey—with the ease of a master—depicts a mind that may, or may not, be breaking down . . . Elyria hitchhikes, meets a handful of characters and thinks. And her ponderings—written in Lacey’s consistently remarkable, urgent prose style—slowly unravel the layers of Elyria’s discontent, revealing an expanse of universal anxiety and uncertainty. Her observations of the country and her ruminations on the past are simultaneously childlike in their wonder and astounding in their depth. Page after page, the novel strikes those rarely accomplished balances between action and interiority, comedy and bleakness, stream-of-consciousness and clarity. An uncomplicated plot written with honesty and linguistic deftness characterizes many of the world’s great novels, including this debut. As the story concludes, Lacey does not assert any sense of closure because there are no lessons here, only a stunning portrait of, to paraphrase Doris Lessing, a woman going mad all by herself." —Tiffany Gibert
"Catherine Lacey's debut novel explores that deeply human question... She holds the reader rapt for 244 pages, vividly situating us—entrapping us, really." —Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
"Catherine Lacey’s remarkably immersive and morbidly humorous debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing, reminds one of Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar . . . As Elyria increasingly feels that she is ‘a human non sequitur’ and perhaps ‘a form of radiation,’ Lacey brilliantly captures her decline through long, winding sentences. Her descent is as harrowing as it is magnetic." —Vikas Turakhia
"Ever think of taking off and just going somewhere totally random? Lacey's debut introduces us to Elyria, who takes off from her stable American life to go live in New Zealand. It's a story that jumps out at you, and is full of the type of wisdom you just don't get from many debut novelists." —Jason Diamond
"Nobody Is Ever Missing has the rare quality of being totally riveting but also very quiet. I read this book as fast as I would any thriller, but instead of high-speed chases there is a woman, mostly alone, sifting through her own thoughts and memories. The narrator, a young woman who has run away from her husband and family, is traveling through New Zealand for most of the book, but this isn’t a traditional quest narrative—or maybe it is, but the quest is dark and personal and indirect and circuitous. Catherine Lacey’s voice is something truly special; there is a wildebeest at the heart of this novel and you need to meet it." —Rachel Riederer
"Lacey wisely chooses to structure the book using short chapters, which keeps the pacing swift . . . The short chapters have the shape and feel of vignettes, and they allow Elyria to move back and forth in time as she fills us in on the backstory that pushed her to leave . . . We, like her, are captivated by the descent, helpless to watch and wander along." —Jennine Capo Crucet
"Catherine Lacey's virtuosic debut is a gutsy, lyric meditation on identity, love, transformation, and what it means to be free. It is a breathtakingly accomplished novel, and Catherine Lacey is a riveting new voice in contemporary fiction." —Laura van den Berg
"A dense, subtle series of meditations on domestication, estrangement, wildness, and above all, loss and absence." —David Shields, author of How Literature Saved My Life and coauthor of Salinger
"Catherine Lacey has a magic voice like none I’ve ever read before. An unknown cousin of both David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a fabulously intelligent and witty book, and also a very moving one." —Rivka Galchen
"This book lives and breathes. It is a squall and Catherine Lacey is a force." —Amelia Gray
"A dark, precise jewel of a novel that does what every piece of writing should: cast a subtly new light on the world around us." —John Wray
"Catherine Lacey's voice is wholly unique, somehow managing to be both a challenge and a relief at the same time. Nobody is Ever Missing is one of my favourite books of the year, a journey to the other side of the world I won't soon forget." —Jami Attenberg
This is how much I liked Catherine Lacey’s début novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing”: I read it over a summer weekend, mostly transfixed, earmarking nearly every other page to identify perceptions or turns of phrase I might wish to return to. The novel is an unlikely page-turner, since it takes place almost entirely in the narrator’s head, and it will not appeal to everyone, least of all to those who are interested in intricate plot development. Then again, even voracious readers read for amorphous and not easily articulated reasons, and this particular book satisfies all my inchoate readerly impulses—including the primary one of getting out of my own skin and into someone else’s—in a way that, say, Donna Tartt’s more explicitly pitched “The Goldfinch” decidedly does not.
“Nobody Is Ever Missing” takes its title from John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 29,” which also contains one of my all-time favorite lines, “All the bells say: too late”—an expression of belatedness that captures the psychic tense in which the novel’s story is told. The book begins breathlessly, mid-thought, as though we are in the midst of a conversation with the narrator and our interest has already been whetted: “There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them.” The story’s protagonist is named, a bit fussily, Elyria, in commemoration of “a town in Ohio that my mother had never visited,” but the novel, although consumingly pensive, is anything but fussy.
Elyria (known to intimates as Elly), a Barnard graduate who appears to be in her late twenties, has abruptly abandoned her life in New York, where she wrote soap-opera scripts, for the open roads of New Zealand, where she knows not a soul and spends much of her time hitchhiking. (We never discover a reason for Elyria’s departure beyond her pervasive sense of life-bereavement—her feeling that “nothing is clear or easy to me anymore”—and her wish to leave the “concrete wasps’ nest” of the city). The strangers she meets keep warning her about the dangers of this mode of travel; one tells her about an American girl who was picked up a year earlier by a “bloke” who “chopped her up into about fifty-five pieces and left her all over the country.” But this is the way Elyria chooses to move around, despite the risks: “A woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.” The latent violence on the novel’s periphery eventually erupts in an unexpected way, when Elyria is attacked by a stingray and ends up hospitalized.
Elyria’s ostensible destination is the farm of Werner, a well-known poet (“Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence”) whom she meets once in New York, at a reading; afterwards, he off-handedly invites her to stay at his place in New Zealand, scrawling an address on a scrap of paper. By the time Elyria actually arrives at Werner’s home, more than a hundred pages into the novel, we have learned quite a bit about her: the odd circumstances of her marriage to an older man, a math professor, from whom she feels increasingly estranged; the suicide of her adopted Korean sister, Ruby; her unhappy relationship with her erratic, out-of-it mother; her immersion in the novel “Mrs. Bridge,” by Evan Connell, whose casually ominous tone suits her mood. But what we have come to understand more than her motives for escaping her own existence is the pattern of her thoughts, the nuanced yet elliptical way she takes in the world around her, whether it’s “a small and brutally lit waiting area in the university police office,” a “wisp thin crack in the ceiling,” or “the unnerving precision” with which a woman slides a pile of diced onions into a hot skillet. We also come to understand that nothing in Elyria’s life—not the various people she meets on her trip, such as Jaye, a transsexual flight attendant who provides her with temporary lodging and sympathy, nor the distilled memories of her childhood and her marriage—means as much to her as keeping the demons inside her (she calls them “the wildebeest”) at bay. Although she is literally running away from herself by going on the road, she is also homing in on the root cause of her terror: her fear that she has done “everything wrong.”
“Nobody is Ever Missing” has its longueurs, to be sure, and some of its lineaments seem a bit wobbly—I was never quite persuaded of the reality of Elyria’s New York life. But it is never less than strikingly original. By the novel’s end—which is blessedly free of even a whiff of so-called closure, and leaves us entangled in Elyria’s thoughts as she sits in a diner back in New York, “watching the rippled surface of my coffee quiver”—we have reached the idiosyncratic heart of the human mystery: we know this person profoundly well, but she might surprise us at any minute. Elyria has become interesting in the way that our dearest friends are, both familiar and profoundly not-us. I wanted to go on hearing her every passing observation, as though I might find salvation in the free-floating, embracing specificity of her details. For instance: “I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I’d ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems.”
Lacey has written a postmodern existential novel, featuring what Leslie Jamison, in her recent essay collection, “The Empathy Exams,” terms a “post-wounded woman”—one with a brain on overdrive and emotions that are slow to form, if not quite stalled. These are women, Jamison explains, who “are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much.” In this sense, the novel is very contemporary, I suppose, but it is also classical in its delineation of the youthful impulse to define oneself; among other things, I was thrilled to read a book in which the main character doesn’t own a cell phone and no one writes emails. Mostly, though, I was excited by its sustained attunement to the disjunctive universe its protagonist inhabits, and the way the writer nimbly hop-skips around, cutting squibs of arresting dialogue into the meditative sections and gimlet-eyed details (“The front desk sent flowers and a balloon and a stuffed bear—the string noosed around his neck”). Lacey is a very gifted writer and thinker, and if this is what post-wounded women sound like—diffident about the pain of being alive, funny and dead-on about the obstacles to being their best selves—I say bring ’em on.
- Daphne MerkinRenata Adler’s cult novel “Speedboat” (1976) was reissued last year and has caught on among a new generation of readers. It’s having a long, largely deserved moment.
The best thing I’ve read about Ms. Adler’s novel came from Katie Roiphe, writing in Slate. She carefully tucked “Speedboat” alongside Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” and Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights” as a sleek ’70s-era example of the “Smart Women Adrift” genre, narratives filled with “pretty yet melancholy vignettes of the state of being lost.”
Ms. Adler condensed her theme in “Speedboat” this way: “I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”
Catherine Lacey’s searching, emotionally resonant first novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” is about a young woman who pulls the pin on her own life, fleeing the country rather than staying behind to witness the collateral damage. She seeks not just a divorce from her husband “but a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history; I was being pushed by currents, by unseen things, memories and imaginations and fears swirled together.”
This 28-year-old woman, who bears a deep purple name (Elyria), gets her wish. She escapes to New Zealand, where she floats passively from experience to experience. She feels she is “a human non sequitur — senseless and misplaced, a bad joke, a joke with no place to land.”
Elyria is disengaged and depleted in a manner that put me in mind of the characters in the novels of Tao Lin, that Zen summoner of millennial ennui. Yet there’s nothing depleted about Ms. Lacey’s prose, which manages to be dreamy and fierce at the same time.
Let me show her off by zeroing in on one scene. Elyria, hitchhiking, steps into the kind of damaged car she knows should terrify her. The grizzled guy behind the wheel “was shirtless and had a body that suggested he lived on a cliff and the only way to get home was to climb it.”
She thinks, with the mixture of fear, bravado and bleak comedy that defines her, “This looked like the beginning of a porno or slasher movie and I didn’t want to be slashed or porned, but I did need to get about a hundred miles west of this parking lot and the sun was nearly setting and this car was the only one making an offer and I have always been unable to decline anyone’s offer of almost anything.”
Did I mention that the grizzled guy’s voice “sounded like vinyl played backward”? Or that Elyria — let’s start calling her Elly, as some people do — reports, “My organs let me know how much they disapproved of where I was sitting”? This scene lasts only five pages yet conjures a complete and complicated world.
Elly comes with a back story, one this novel wears lightly. She is married to a tenured mathematics professor at Columbia (he’s a decade older) and lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She works for CBS, writing soap operas. These details ring somewhat hollow. Ms. Lacey doesn’t tweezer in enough inside information to make these milieus seem entirely credible.
Elly’s sister, adopted from South Korea, was an academic prodigy who committed suicide while at Barnard. Her mother is a drunk. Her father is “in Puerto Rico doing cheap boob jobs or something.”
“Nobody Is Ever Missing” is composed mostly of long, languid sentences that push into the night like headlights. They’re the sign of a writer settling in for a long backcourt game, one who is going to wear you down rather than go in for the kill.
Sometimes these sentences lose their way, stall out or end up doubling back on themselves. Just as often, they are improbably beautiful, or simply cool and knowing. Here is Ms. Lacey, excellently, on how married people sometimes gawk at one another:
“My husband was staring at me with this brand-new look of his, one I had never seen before but would see much more of in the future; he was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn’t working quite like it should, like he’d found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate.”
Ms. Lacey’s slim novel impressed me, and held me to my chair. There’s significant talent at work here. One salient thing about “Nobody Is Ever Missing” is that Elly, even at 28, is so much more girl than woman. The heroines of “Speedboat,” “Play It as It Lays” and “Sleepless Nights” would consume her like an oyster.
“She spoke to me like I was a child, which was fine because I wanted to be one,” Elly says at one point. At another, “The voice of a teenage girl came up in me.” At yet another, she appears to be a “lost small animal with a passport.” Elly’s arrested development and her deep anomie arrive with a side order of brooding narcissism, one that can feel like a prickly assessment of the author’s generation.
Ms. Lacey can stand far enough away from her heroine to have an observer, an older male poet, throw this long spear: “You’re one of those women who think nothing is good enough for you, the entire human experience is not good enough for you and you want something impossible.”
“Nobody Is Ever Missing” gets so much right that you easily push past its small flaws. It’s an aching portrait of a young woman doing the hard thing, “trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.” -
Elyria is traveling through New Zealand by herself, hitchhiking, and every encountered woman advises her to avoid the men that offer transport. She does not heed this recommendation, even as she recognizes it as good advice, but no harm comes to her from those whose offers of help could be a front for predation. What eventually lands her in the hospital is a stingray, an occurrence unforeseen to the narratives that she encounters present to her, but foreshadowed by an earlier passage about the violence that roils inside the ocean:
I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything's, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is -- big hole full of things chewing each other -- and it's odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they're really after as they stare -- that ferocious pulse under all things placid.
Nobody Is Ever Missing, largely absent of any incidents of external action, has the same pulse. An inner violence emerges between divisions inside Elyria's self, between the past and the present, between who she is and what she can articulate aloud. Her internal voice, the book's own, expresses a self-consciousness in long and circular sentences that manifests externally as silence and sentence fragments as she lets other people talk. What Elyria wants from people, the virtue her inner monologue most often extols, is for them to know what she wants, or for them to give it to her unknowingly. Most often what she wants is some form of silence she can interpret as an unspoken understanding. This quality of quiet is referred to at points as politeness, but we are also told that lambs lie down to be slaughtered for the sake of being polite.
In one segment where Elyria does speak of her feelings, it is a flashback to a medical study undergone in New York, where electrodes are hooked to her scalp, and she is asked personal questions for a purpose she is both paranoid regarding and ostensibly understands. Her observers do not care about what she says, the content of her thoughts, but they want to see where her mind goes, what sparks light up when asked questions that allow for an inner search.
As the voyage is made across New Zealand, readers mostly follow Elyria's mind as it moves into similar flashbacks. They do not get to know well the people she encountered, in keeping with the perspective of someone wanting silence. She relates to her fellow travelers through a self-aware scrim that voices their words through the lens of her experience:
Outsiders recognize outsiders, I guess, though most of what she talked to me about was how being trans doesn't make you an outsider in Wellington because everyone here is so welcoming and tolerant and fabulous, how no one talks shit to anyone and even if someone did try to start shit, someone else would fuck that person up for even trying to start shit or talk shit in the first place. This is just what Jaye told me. I didn't hear anyone talk shit about anyone or see anyone else fuck someone up for talking or starting shit in the first place.
This use of repetition in sentence structures, and the recurrence of flashbacks, allows Catherine Lacey returned to the image of Elyria having a wildebeest inside of her often enough that it stops functioning as a metaphor and becomes a character, a variant of the self inside the self, and this then makes it clear that it is an interior landscape being explored, more than any journey through New Zealand. The husband the narrator left behind in New York is treated similarly, referred to as Husband, without a name of his own, a title that exists only in relation to her that she is nonetheless alienated from. The husband is also referred to, before his given name emerges spoken from his own mouth, as the professor, a role he filled in the life of Elyria's sister Ruby, genius and suicide, whose absence haunts Elyria. It is the idea of private loss that brought the two of them together, but the very fact that loss is private still leaves a gap large enough to initiate a journey around the world in search of some silence and peace.
Catherine Lacey also wrote a piece for Guernica earlier this year, about the idea of politeness, as it manifests in the state of Mississippi, where she grew up, as an unwillingness to talk about difficult subjects. This practice is unproductive and self-destructive, and makes it impossible to make real social progress. In this novel, her first, there is no personal growth on Elyria's part, no reconciliations made between any figures estranged. The road trip narrative defines the expectations, that the journey is more important than any destination, even as the psychological inquest provides the real action. The self-consciousness of the book, the sentences that offer contradictions inside themselves, will be related to by most any reader who seeks in reading the pleasure of self-recognition, even as the act of reading superimposes someone else's consciousness upon the brain. - Brian Nicholson
Admit it, lovers: There are days when you awake and want to blow up your relationship. Perhaps things are mildly bad, or perhaps they are horrible, or perhaps there’s nothing for any reasonable human to complain about, but anyhow, something has happened, something has shifted, and in that moment of waking, were you to follow your whims, they would spirit you away to another bed, another city, another life. Sometimes this fantasy swoops in only for a quick spot of tea. Other times it arrives loaded with baggage and settles in for a good long visit, long enough that your discontentedness grows, and you begin acting strangely. You cheat. You golf, or gamble, or take to drink. You eat way too much chocolate. You become addicted to Zumba. At some point this behavior becomes protracted, embarrassing, unhealthy, and you realize it’s time to leave. You inform your other half, who may or may not have seen it coming. Belongings are packed. Excuses are made. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
This, at least, is the polite way of departure. Then there is the way of Elyria, the young woman at the center of Catherine Lacey’s impressive first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, who takes the goodbye part of things to an extreme: She buys herself a ticket from New York to New Zealand and vanishes without a word to anyone, including her husband. No phone call. No email. No Post-It.
But why? What has moved this woman with the stable Manhattan lifestyle—job writing for a soap opera, math professor husband, apartment on the Upper West Side—to live out of a backpack, sleep in sheds, and beg rides from strangers, to become a “human non sequitur—senseless and misplaced”?
At first Elyria’s destination, if not her motivation, is clear: the farm of Werner, a poet she met at a reading she was strong-armed into attending in New York, who after a brief exchange left her with his address scrawled on a scrap of paper. Though Elyria doesn’t like poetry, something about Werner gives her “an odd comfort”; he writes about loneliness, possesses an infectious confidence, has offered her a room of her own. Once arrived at Werner’s farm, Elyria is content with her “new, tiny life of just a few words and few people.” As for Werner, he is intrigued until he isn’t, deciding eventually that Elyria is too sad to bear. Soon she is deposited at the side of the road, alone with herself, nowhere to go.
At first Elyria’s destination, if not her motivation, is clear: the farm of Werner, a poet she met at a reading she was strong-armed into attending in New York, who after a brief exchange left her with his address scrawled on a scrap of paper. Though Elyria doesn’t like poetry, something about Werner gives her “an odd comfort”; he writes about loneliness, possesses an infectious confidence, has offered her a room of her own. Once arrived at Werner’s farm, Elyria is content with her “new, tiny life of just a few words and few people.” As for Werner, he is intrigued until he isn’t, deciding eventually that Elyria is too sad to bear. Soon she is deposited at the side of the road, alone with herself, nowhere to go.
And so, thumb out, Elyria continues to traverse the country, putting herself at the mercy of the elements and passing drivers, toiling at menial work in exchange for lodging, tolerating company but not courting closeness. Other characters—drawn by Lacey in quick, vivid sketches—are flashes on the canvas, as is the landscape, which Elyria, so stuck in the mire of her own thoughts, mostly ignores. As she wanders, her mind whorls and spills, but in Lacey’s hands these are controlled spills: She guides us seamlessly from present to past, revealing piece by piece the grievances and wounds that impelled Elyria toward flight.
We learn of the alcoholic mother and the child-prodigy sister—Korean, adopted, dead of suicide by age 22. We learn of the husband who commits savage acts in his sleep and believes Elyria has come unhinged—“he was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn’t working quite like it should, like he’d found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research.” We learn that back home, Elyria lived under the crushing expectation that she ought to be a specific kind of woman: less complex, less combative, less than fully herself. We learn that her marriage had become a confusion of anger and disillusionment, and that before long she was engaging in “arguments about the way we argue” with her husband during which she began “thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.”
Have I mentioned that this book is a comedy?
And it is funny, not in a zany way, but in the audaciously morbid way a Coen brothers picture is funny, or the way Six Feet Under was funny, all those people preoccupied by death able, in their daydreams, to break into joyous, hand-wagging song.
The novel’s title is taken from John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” a chilling poem about a man plagued by phantom violence, sure he has committed grisly acts, despite all evidence to the contrary. Elyria, who narrates from a distance of years, is similarly haunted: “When I looked back on things I had done,” she explains, “I wasn’t convinced that I had done any of it and when I made a mental list of things I had not done I couldn’t put anything on it.”
Although her visions—wild, frequently macabre—disturb her, Elyria isn’t so much sick and twisted as uncommonly attuned to the shadows. On love: “To love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria.” On hitchhiking: “I thought if I heard someone call me brave one more time I might rip off my own thumb and not even bother to stop the blood from staining their upholstery.” On vacation: “It’s odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives ... blood rushing under the surface.”
Although her visions—wild, frequently macabre—disturb her, Elyria isn’t so much sick and twisted as uncommonly attuned to the shadows. On love: “To love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria.” On hitchhiking: “I thought if I heard someone call me brave one more time I might rip off my own thumb and not even bother to stop the blood from staining their upholstery.” On vacation: “It’s odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives ... blood rushing under the surface.”
Lacey adroitly treads the line between the poignant and the comic, and evokes beautifully the weird intrusiveness of memory, its suddenness and randomness—a car crash, for example, summons for Elyria the image of a depressed sister frying and eating slice upon slice of bacon over the course of an afternoon. She also favors labyrinthine sentences, which mimic the perpetual motion of Elyria’s restive mind. Her language pulses and breathes, and although she periodically pushes it a beat too far—overstretching the odd metaphor, tilting into sentimentality, indulging in the occasional cutesy pun (a kindly barkeep is a “tender tender,” something “un-understandable” becomes “derstandable”)—more often than not she writes with pitch-perfect diction. In the course of one passage, she can flit from disaffection and despond to absurdity and tenderness and back again:
I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was, so I stood a considerable distance from the highway, backpack still on, a little shrub at my feet, and it seemed the shrub, too, had slept in a stranger’s backyard last night, and we stood by the highway both looking as if we’d been left here by accident, as if we were waiting for someone to remember us and come back and take us home, and I noticed the elaborate story I’d made for this little plant and wondered if I was just projecting a story of myself onto him, but the shrub and I just stood there, vague and waiting, until a car came and took me some miles from where I’d been.
I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was, so I stood a considerable distance from the highway, backpack still on, a little shrub at my feet, and it seemed the shrub, too, had slept in a stranger’s backyard last night, and we stood by the highway both looking as if we’d been left here by accident, as if we were waiting for someone to remember us and come back and take us home, and I noticed the elaborate story I’d made for this little plant and wondered if I was just projecting a story of myself onto him, but the shrub and I just stood there, vague and waiting, until a car came and took me some miles from where I’d been.
Troubled as she is, Elyria is no monster—she’s too humane, her compassion for others so intense as to be debilitating: “The bartender’s face was boyish and pained, so much so I felt like his mother when I looked at him, and it was unbearable to see him so unhappy. … This was not a convenient feeling to have when all I wanted was to order a sandwich and beer.” She may hate poetry, but she has the empathetic soul of a poet—the kind whose muse finds her not frolicking among wildflowers but brooding in seedy pubs.
Early in the novel, remembering her sister, Elyria tells us: “I have never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she’d be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?” What she cannot yet see is that her capacity to give a damn—about other people, about her own usefulness, about the obligation to live an authentic life—is as much a part of her nature as her tendency toward darkness, and it is the twinning of these qualities that will save her. The lesson she grapples toward in Lacey’s wise and dazzling novel is simple: You can travel to the ends of the earth, but you can never escape yourself. - Jennifer B. McDonald
My copy of Catherine Lacey’s debut novel is dog-eared to the degree of making all those folded corners pointless. The book is one large dog-eared page, because you don’t have to flip far to find sentences and sentiments that make you pause and stare at the words, those simple marvels, and emit the sort of soft “oh” that usually comes after finishing a poem.
Nobody Is Ever Missing tracks the journey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman hitchhiking across New Zealand after abruptly leaving her husband and life in New York. Her destination is the farm of a man named Werner, who invited her to visit after the two met at a party. This offhand remark, offered out of politeness, becomes a focal point for Elyria when she decides to leave. We join her on the side of the road, her thumb out, for the first of many rides with strangers.
Our first question is also the question of almost everyone she meets—the question Elyria herself struggles to answer. Why did she leave? The factors fall in place through flashbacks: the suicide of her adopted sister, Ruby, six years earlier, and her marriage to Charles, a math professor who was the last person to see Ruby alive. Yet the explanation is indirect, unlike the formulas Charles clacks out on the chalkboard in the middle of the night. Elyria is searching for something larger than all of the parts: the ability to escape life while still living.
Lacey’s prose is elastic; it stretches to accommodate a number of smart and poignant observations about the human heart. Elyria wonders about the “magic trick that other people seem to know—how to dissolve a sense of loss, how to unbraid it from a brain.” She wonders “which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous” and “what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless.” She wonders a lot. We’re deeply immersed in Elyria’s mind. We experience the untethering of her thoughts, the loose grasping for a world that grows increasingly bizarre to her. Yet the immersion is so complete and persistent that it makes her actions—the plot, her outward journey through the hills and cities of New Zealand—inconsequential. Strangers come and go, brief encounters with an assortment of bartenders, Bohemians, and truck drivers that might have pressed Elyria more. Even Werner’s farm, her supposed goal, barely registers on the plot. A chapter passes and they’re gone.
The novel is about the why and not the what. That’s fine, but the poetic, imaginative qualities of Elyria’s musings also ask for a reader’s patience. Metaphors abound. A promising one about the wildebeest Elyria feels inside of her, a dangerous force that “can throw all its beastly pounds and heavy bones at anything that attacks it,” eventually fades and is replaced by others: the inaudible noises that surround certain strangers, and the countless comparisons—mold, music, bullets—she makes to understand the realities of death and marriage. The overall effect is like a Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: beautiful and smart observations about what it means to be human, but more like a list than a coherent whole. The reader may eventually burn out.
This mass of metaphor makes me wonder if Lacey could have trusted the inherent richness in Elyria and her decision to leave. Minor flashbacks about a lab experiment she participated in—electrodes and blood samples—along with memories of Charles’ night terrors, in which he nearly strangles her, emphasize why her grip on reality has slipped. But what if the deck wasn’t stacked so heavily that way? What if the tests and metaphors were scaled back and we were allowed to experience what’s truly frightening about the novel’s premise: any of us might feel the urge to abandon our lives and have to contend with the wildebeest. And the opposite: the people we love may disappear tomorrow. “Maybe it is time for me to be clear,” Elyria thinks at one point. I wish those dog-eared pages, in Lacey’s such talented and capable hands, might have forced Elyria—and us—to face those truths directly. - Scott Onak
In the beginning, before the Word there were the words in the beginning, a seeding from which nothingness gains form.
Before the first sentence of her laser smart, affecting, confounding, recalcitrant, infuriating, relentlessly stylish debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey presents the entirety of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29.” Berryman’s career is frequently reduced to the shaping forces of two monumental events: the gunshot suicide of his father and the poet’s own suicidal leap. In the first stanza of “Dream Song 29,” Berryman’s alter ego, Henry, assesses the eternal wracking of that first death, an undoing that forever changed the poet’s name and possessed such gravity that no passage of time could ever budge its crushing weight.
Lacey’s novel, too,begins with an absence – without a word, the narrator, Elyria, drops out of her life in New York, abandoning her home, her math professor husband, and her steady job writing for a network soap opera in order to pursue an off-handed invitation from an older poet, Werner, who amid casual discussion had made the type of if you’re ever in my neck of the woods offer that is commonly extended when no one ever comes to that particular neck of the woods: in this case, a homestead in the middle of nowhere on the opposite side of the world.
New Zealand.
Before swapping one “New” for another, Elyria’s adult life was shaped by the loss of her adopted sister, Ruby, a promising math prodigy who leapt to her death in a campus courtyard. The professor was the last person to see Ruby alive—he and Elyria met and found connection through the bond of this negation.
“Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted. I didn’t want to want anything; I wanted to want everything.”
If you believe that storytelling begins with a character who wants and needs something and must face obstacles in order to get it, Catherine Lacey means to defy your expectations.
“Every questioning is a seeking,” Heidegger wrote in Being and Time. “Every seeking takes its lead beforehand from what is sought.”Elyria doesn’t simply seek to discard the clinging matter of her life; she wants to lose herself without holding any corresponding motivation to find herself. Though disdaining the hollow person she’s become in married life, Elyria is also suspicious of her core, feeling that deep down she has “a wildebeest renting a room in her.” Hitchhiking toward Werner’s farm, she sometimes suppresses this wildebeest nature and sometimes lets it snort. In her prior life, Elyria had imagined resolving arguments with her husband by stabbing herself in the eyeball or detonating an explosive in his head: Only the flimsy line of inhibition separates the instinct to horrific violence and the thrust for blood.
In the third and final stanza of “Dream Song 29,” Henry feels so unmoored that the only way he knows for sure he hasn’t lost himself to the animal state of a compulsive killer is by making a mental tally of all those close to him; “nobody is ever missing”in this reckoning, and that tenuous accounting is the only assurance he’s maintained a grip.
Somewhere in Henry is John Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.): the thread of identity. Richard Wright explored the severance of this thread in The Outsider, during which a depressed postal worker is beset by debt problems, marriage problems, mistress problems, booze problems, a mass of problems begetting problems until a way out presents itself: a fatal subway crash and a mistake identifying him among the dead. Relieved of his burdensome identity, cutting all ties to his past, the postal worker walks away from his old life and into an unbound freedom within which nothing prevents him from committing murder after murder:
Men in vans offer Elyria rides. She accepts. They tend to be agreeable sorts. Wanting nothing but the minimum from others, Elyria tends not to be an acute perceiver of character; rather than generating friction through interaction or conflict with offbeat locals, Lacey creates momentum through sheer prosodic dexterity:
Also similar to van den Berg—and underscored by the equations chalked by Elyria’s husband—Lacey writes characters who often function in accordance with physical principles, creating a world populated by conduits and catalysts and voids, with universal laws acting upon relationships, movement, and the order of things. Elyria appears as something loose and negatively charged, briefly connecting to anything positive in a superficial bond that quickly degrades under the stress of her malaise.
Reaching Werner’s farm, Elyria finally finds a sort of precarious balance. She entertains no intellectual, sexual, philosophical, or psychological interest in the older poet;
The novel can feel like picking up a child when they’ve gone deliberately boneless, a passive disembodying through which they actively become heavier, their entire mass nothing but displaced resistance, and as they flop and sandbag you become increasing frustrated, muttering curses you swore you wouldn’t voice and laboring against that deadweight, forced into being someone you didn’t intend to be simply in order to move from Point A to Point B. In this manner, a smaller body is able to exert control over a larger one. This “child” metaphor is not a paternalistic infantilizing of either author or narrator; within the novel, the notion of “growing up” or existing as a grown-up is a recurring concern, and in-keeping with her character, Elyria at times idealizes, and at other times wishes to transcend, a child-like existence. Elyria was 22 when she married, with her husband a decade older and possessed of an array of independent life experiences she feels she lacked:
In an essay “Against Bless-Your-Heart Manners” published earlier this year at Guernica, Lacey wrote about the “paralyzing politeness”that affects residents of the South, with “the tradition of courtesy and avoidance at all costs” inhibiting the advance of social progress. While arguing for the need to forgo tidy niceties in favor of candid speech, the essay proper is paired with a sidebar of off-the-cuff footnotes, a reflexive, reflective id in which the author speaks far more freely than in the body of the text.
Some things are easier done than said.
While still at the farm, Elyria asks Werner why lambs give up so easily when it’s their time to be slaughtered: “They are not giving up, he said. They are just being polite.”
In Wright’s The Outsider, a woman who fell in love with the ex-postal worker ultimately leaps from an apartment window when she realizes she gave herself over to a man who contained such a terrifying void. Her name is Eva; his, Cross:
Following the epigraph of “Dream Song 29,” Nobody Is Ever Missing begins with an immediate grabber of an opening line, the first of many: “There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them.” This dynamic lead indicates a time when her husband suspected Elyria was about to leave; only thereafter, for the entirety of the book, neither she nor her husband suggest he had any sort of involuntary ESP, as both continually operate from the perspective that he was utterly blind-sided by her sudden disappearance.
Can an object define itself from a false beginning? Or does that untrue step cause a thing to forever lose its way?
Elyria’s narration proves unreliable both from the pitfalls of her memory and psyche as well as the inconsistency born of sentences that shimmer beautifully but often don’t sync with the internal logic of their fictional world. The novel’s principal flaw and principal concern are one and the same: the inability to remain grounded in what came prior.
Looked at from a certain angle, this may not be a flaw at all.
As a seed of disharmony in their relationship, on their honeymoon Elyria’s husband tells her that she has “two options” with regard to how she can engage with her feelings. Elyria seethes under this binary, determined to prove that a galaxy of options exists. As the novel progresses, as Elyria fully removes herself from the mores and memories of her past, the existing narrative is left with only two possibilities: she will, or she will not. The irony and tragedy is that whichever arc she pursues, both come full circle to an identical end. - Nathan Huffstutter
In her daring début, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey puts into words the secret, unspoken desire so many of us harbor: to just leave your life and responsibilities without any explanation and go do something else. While few of us will ever actually do this, Nobody Is Ever Missing cuts deep and tries to understand why that desire persists.
The novel’s narrator, Elyria, is a 28-year-old soap opera writer who ups and leaves—without telling a soul—her comfortable life on the Upper West Side and her husband, a tenured professor of mathematics at Columbia University, to hitchhike in New Zealand and stay at a farm on a vague invitation from a poet she met once at a reading. The setup of a young woman traveling alone in an unfamiliar place may sound like the beginning of a thriller or horror flick, and Lacey certainly plays on the reader’s expectation of danger. When Elyria gets into “exactly the kind of car they say to avoid” with “a long-haired, bearded driver,” she muses: “This looked like the beginning of a porno or slasher movie and I didn’t want to be slashed or porned, but I did need to get about a hundred miles west of this parking lot and the sun was nearly setting and this car was the only one making an offer and I have always been unable to decline anyone’s offer of almost anything.” No gripping plot drives Lacey’s story, which subverts both the road novel, that staple of the literary old boys’ club, and the journey narrative—there isn’t much of a transformation at the end. Instead, what we have is a young woman’s paranoiac mind in search of something we may call a “self,” or perhaps a complete emptying of that self. “I’d still like, some mornings, to be the thing running far from me instead of sewn inside myself forever,” Elyria says. She spends the novel struggling to understand the “wildebeest” that lives inside her and that “told” her to “leave that perfectly nice apartment and absolutely suitable job and routines and husband who didn’t do anything completely awful.”
What makes Lacey’s novel more powerful and unsettling than the mere ramblings of a privileged white woman going through a quarter-life crisis is its unmistakably subversive tone. Elyria may be irritating and unreliable at times, as most interesting narrators usually are, and her travels may lead her back to the beginning, but she is still defying authority and a society that has pigeonholed her into the roles she has to play. “You’re one of those women who thinks nothing is good enough for you, the entire human existence is not good enough for you and you want something impossible,” Werner, the poet Elyria briefly stays with, tells her. But it’s not that simple.
Elyria is not satisfied with the options available to women because she knows that “nearly a majority of women had been, most likely, abused or assaulted or molested or whatever, and any woman who had not yet been abused or assaulted or molested or whatever should just wait, just give it a day or a year or a week or so because most likely it was going to happen to her.” While Nobody Is Ever Missing has a strong feminist undertow, it explores a variety of shackles that society binds us in: not just the political labels and economic barcodes constantly being stuck on each and every one of us, but also the bonds of love so many of us enter willingly. As Elyria puts it, “to love some is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria.” While Elyria comes to the conclusion that she “needs to be near people who don’t need” her, she also understands that that is an impossible wish and that loss is inevitable.
Lacey has written a melancholy and very funny novel in a serpentine and supple prose that can take a seemingly cliché phrase like “my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to” and manipulate it until it is utterly strange. By the end of the journey, the reader is disoriented enough to notice, like Elyria does, “how the earth and everything on it is ever and ever shaking, all the time.”
- Alisa Sniderman
Early in the novel, remembering her sister, Elyria tells us: “I have never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she’d be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?” What she cannot yet see is that her capacity to give a damn—about other people, about her own usefulness, about the obligation to live an authentic life—is as much a part of her nature as her tendency toward darkness, and it is the twinning of these qualities that will save her. The lesson she grapples toward in Lacey’s wise and dazzling novel is simple: You can travel to the ends of the earth, but you can never escape yourself. - Jennifer B. McDonald
My copy of Catherine Lacey’s debut novel is dog-eared to the degree of making all those folded corners pointless. The book is one large dog-eared page, because you don’t have to flip far to find sentences and sentiments that make you pause and stare at the words, those simple marvels, and emit the sort of soft “oh” that usually comes after finishing a poem.
Nobody Is Ever Missing tracks the journey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman hitchhiking across New Zealand after abruptly leaving her husband and life in New York. Her destination is the farm of a man named Werner, who invited her to visit after the two met at a party. This offhand remark, offered out of politeness, becomes a focal point for Elyria when she decides to leave. We join her on the side of the road, her thumb out, for the first of many rides with strangers.
Our first question is also the question of almost everyone she meets—the question Elyria herself struggles to answer. Why did she leave? The factors fall in place through flashbacks: the suicide of her adopted sister, Ruby, six years earlier, and her marriage to Charles, a math professor who was the last person to see Ruby alive. Yet the explanation is indirect, unlike the formulas Charles clacks out on the chalkboard in the middle of the night. Elyria is searching for something larger than all of the parts: the ability to escape life while still living.
Catherine Lacey
The novel is about the why and not the what. That’s fine, but the poetic, imaginative qualities of Elyria’s musings also ask for a reader’s patience. Metaphors abound. A promising one about the wildebeest Elyria feels inside of her, a dangerous force that “can throw all its beastly pounds and heavy bones at anything that attacks it,” eventually fades and is replaced by others: the inaudible noises that surround certain strangers, and the countless comparisons—mold, music, bullets—she makes to understand the realities of death and marriage. The overall effect is like a Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: beautiful and smart observations about what it means to be human, but more like a list than a coherent whole. The reader may eventually burn out.
This mass of metaphor makes me wonder if Lacey could have trusted the inherent richness in Elyria and her decision to leave. Minor flashbacks about a lab experiment she participated in—electrodes and blood samples—along with memories of Charles’ night terrors, in which he nearly strangles her, emphasize why her grip on reality has slipped. But what if the deck wasn’t stacked so heavily that way? What if the tests and metaphors were scaled back and we were allowed to experience what’s truly frightening about the novel’s premise: any of us might feel the urge to abandon our lives and have to contend with the wildebeest. And the opposite: the people we love may disappear tomorrow. “Maybe it is time for me to be clear,” Elyria thinks at one point. I wish those dog-eared pages, in Lacey’s such talented and capable hands, might have forced Elyria—and us—to face those truths directly. - Scott Onak
In the beginning, before the Word there were the words in the beginning, a seeding from which nothingness gains form.
Before the first sentence of her laser smart, affecting, confounding, recalcitrant, infuriating, relentlessly stylish debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey presents the entirety of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29.” Berryman’s career is frequently reduced to the shaping forces of two monumental events: the gunshot suicide of his father and the poet’s own suicidal leap. In the first stanza of “Dream Song 29,” Berryman’s alter ego, Henry, assesses the eternal wracking of that first death, an undoing that forever changed the poet’s name and possessed such gravity that no passage of time could ever budge its crushing weight.
Lacey’s novel, too,begins with an absence – without a word, the narrator, Elyria, drops out of her life in New York, abandoning her home, her math professor husband, and her steady job writing for a network soap opera in order to pursue an off-handed invitation from an older poet, Werner, who amid casual discussion had made the type of if you’re ever in my neck of the woods offer that is commonly extended when no one ever comes to that particular neck of the woods: in this case, a homestead in the middle of nowhere on the opposite side of the world.
New Zealand.
Before swapping one “New” for another, Elyria’s adult life was shaped by the loss of her adopted sister, Ruby, a promising math prodigy who leapt to her death in a campus courtyard. The professor was the last person to see Ruby alive—he and Elyria met and found connection through the bond of this negation.
During the opening sequences of the novel, Elyria appears much like one of the female narrators in Laura van den Berg’s short stories, the competent women of “We Are Calling To Offer You A Fabulous Life” or “Up High In The Air,” women who are compelled by an urgent need to shed the burdens and trappings of their dissatisfying lives. There is such a buildup, such a nasty crust formed of one faulty decision crystalized atop another, that the only way to stay whole is with a clean break from the past.
What is your greatest fear? a clinician asks Elyria amid a battery of questions.
I did everything wrong, she answers.
The italics are Lacey’s: Eschewing double-quotes, all of the novel’s spoken dialogue is formatted with italics, infusing conversed words with a sense of remoteness and otherness while emphasizing the indeterminate passage of time between the events and their narration. Elyria’s voice is delivered from a distance that ranges from a few seconds to a gap of several years.
Can standards of time or a notional future exist in a state of emptiness?
Reading Heidegger, I got lost in being and haven’t yet found my way to time, but in the world of Nobody Is Ever Missing the past seems measured more by resonance and magnitude than temporal distance. Elyria only looks back—never forward—and from the limited “now” of her vantage point everything else is “then.”“Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted. I didn’t want to want anything; I wanted to want everything.”
If you believe that storytelling begins with a character who wants and needs something and must face obstacles in order to get it, Catherine Lacey means to defy your expectations.
“Every questioning is a seeking,” Heidegger wrote in Being and Time. “Every seeking takes its lead beforehand from what is sought.”Elyria doesn’t simply seek to discard the clinging matter of her life; she wants to lose herself without holding any corresponding motivation to find herself. Though disdaining the hollow person she’s become in married life, Elyria is also suspicious of her core, feeling that deep down she has “a wildebeest renting a room in her.” Hitchhiking toward Werner’s farm, she sometimes suppresses this wildebeest nature and sometimes lets it snort. In her prior life, Elyria had imagined resolving arguments with her husband by stabbing herself in the eyeball or detonating an explosive in his head: Only the flimsy line of inhibition separates the instinct to horrific violence and the thrust for blood.
In the third and final stanza of “Dream Song 29,” Henry feels so unmoored that the only way he knows for sure he hasn’t lost himself to the animal state of a compulsive killer is by making a mental tally of all those close to him; “nobody is ever missing”in this reckoning, and that tenuous accounting is the only assurance he’s maintained a grip.
Somewhere in Henry is John Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.): the thread of identity. Richard Wright explored the severance of this thread in The Outsider, during which a depressed postal worker is beset by debt problems, marriage problems, mistress problems, booze problems, a mass of problems begetting problems until a way out presents itself: a fatal subway crash and a mistake identifying him among the dead. Relieved of his burdensome identity, cutting all ties to his past, the postal worker walks away from his old life and into an unbound freedom within which nothing prevents him from committing murder after murder:
“He had acted, had shattered the dream that surrounded him, and now the world, including himself in it, had turned mockingly into a concrete, waking nightmare from which he could see no way of escaping. He had become what he had tried to destroy, had taken on the guise of the monster he had slain.”
As she thumbs rides across New Zealand, one friendly Kiwi after another warns Elyria of the risks of being raped and/or dismembered by some crazed man in a van.Men in vans offer Elyria rides. She accepts. They tend to be agreeable sorts. Wanting nothing but the minimum from others, Elyria tends not to be an acute perceiver of character; rather than generating friction through interaction or conflict with offbeat locals, Lacey creates momentum through sheer prosodic dexterity:
“It became clear after some hours of waiting on the narrow, tree-lined road where the nurse had let me out that some places are not good places to be a person and not a car and that was where I was; occasional cars sped around the road bend and I ended up frightening the drivers the way that wild animals do when they stand stunned dumb in a road. The cars would slow or swerve or honk and I wished I could honk back – I know, I know – why am I here?
Using short chapters to stop for breath, Lacey stacks clause upon clause with unerring rhythm, one of those glorious gifts that not everyone’s been given
and guided by that fabulous inner ear she teases out assonances and upends predictable constructions, modulating her phrases with repetitions, inversions, and tautly-strung wit, the novel propelled by sentences that wind their way inward before springing back out with renewed velocity.Also similar to van den Berg—and underscored by the equations chalked by Elyria’s husband—Lacey writes characters who often function in accordance with physical principles, creating a world populated by conduits and catalysts and voids, with universal laws acting upon relationships, movement, and the order of things. Elyria appears as something loose and negatively charged, briefly connecting to anything positive in a superficial bond that quickly degrades under the stress of her malaise.
Reaching Werner’s farm, Elyria finally finds a sort of precarious balance. She entertains no intellectual, sexual, philosophical, or psychological interest in the older poet;
Sustainable for her but not him. Elyria’s elemental sadness weighs so heavily that he finally asks her to “remove herself” from his presence.
And here, at the midpoint of the book, Elyria is set fully adrift. Her initial leaving at least offered the orientating points of departure and destination; once “removed” from Werner’s farm, she has nowhere to be and neither the desire nor the means to get there. She sleeps in parks and eats from trash cans, occasionally accepting a kindly-offered meal or a temporary shelter before shuddering loose and wandering again.
“I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about and almost having a real feeling – a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.”
Offering a lay psychoanalysis of a fictional character is—at best—foolhardy, but as Elyria’s emptiness grows and acts upon itself she offers the reader an intensely-realized view of depression, where nothing positive seems possible and the defiance of help is an insidious, self-perpetuating aspect of the pathology: Were Elyria capable of accepting a helping hand to boost her toward a more satisfying way of being, she wouldn’t be stuck in such a hole in the first place.The novel can feel like picking up a child when they’ve gone deliberately boneless, a passive disembodying through which they actively become heavier, their entire mass nothing but displaced resistance, and as they flop and sandbag you become increasing frustrated, muttering curses you swore you wouldn’t voice and laboring against that deadweight, forced into being someone you didn’t intend to be simply in order to move from Point A to Point B. In this manner, a smaller body is able to exert control over a larger one. This “child” metaphor is not a paternalistic infantilizing of either author or narrator; within the novel, the notion of “growing up” or existing as a grown-up is a recurring concern, and in-keeping with her character, Elyria at times idealizes, and at other times wishes to transcend, a child-like existence. Elyria was 22 when she married, with her husband a decade older and possessed of an array of independent life experiences she feels she lacked:
“What I meant was I knew I had to do something that I didn’t know how to do, which was leaving the adult way, the grown-up way, stating the problem, filling out the paperwork, doing all these adult things, but I knew that wasn’t the whole problem, that I didn’t just want a divorce from my husband, but a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history.”
Elyria’s inability to settle into the adult world is largely bred by her unwillingness to say what’s on her mind. In her interactions, what she wishes (or imagines) she had said and what she actually does say consistently diverge: steering mightily from conflict, Elyria is left further and further from herself, further and further from the words of hers that act upon the world, the words that define her to those in the world around her, leaving her stuck between the interior world of the unsaid and the exterior world of unmeant compromises and capitulations.In an essay “Against Bless-Your-Heart Manners” published earlier this year at Guernica, Lacey wrote about the “paralyzing politeness”that affects residents of the South, with “the tradition of courtesy and avoidance at all costs” inhibiting the advance of social progress. While arguing for the need to forgo tidy niceties in favor of candid speech, the essay proper is paired with a sidebar of off-the-cuff footnotes, a reflexive, reflective id in which the author speaks far more freely than in the body of the text.
Some things are easier done than said.
While still at the farm, Elyria asks Werner why lambs give up so easily when it’s their time to be slaughtered: “They are not giving up, he said. They are just being polite.”
In Wright’s The Outsider, a woman who fell in love with the ex-postal worker ultimately leaps from an apartment window when she realizes she gave herself over to a man who contained such a terrifying void. Her name is Eva; his, Cross:
“She had fled from him forever; she had taken one swift look into the black depths of his heart, into the churning horror of his deeds and had been so revolted that she had chosen this way out, had slammed the door on her life.”
Because Elyria wants nothing, and nothing is capable of causing her to change, Lacey is forced to find new ways of saying the same thing over and over. From this absence she pulls at strand after strand of remarkable prose, but a time comes when matters grow more dire and emptiness threatens to collapse on itself and yet above it all Lacey continues to pull more colored streamers from her sleeve.
Time may or may not be real, but pages are, and the more she pulls, the more those silks begin to seem purple and frayed
: Through repetition and exposure, terrific artistry can take on the appearance of mere legerdemain.Following the epigraph of “Dream Song 29,” Nobody Is Ever Missing begins with an immediate grabber of an opening line, the first of many: “There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them.” This dynamic lead indicates a time when her husband suspected Elyria was about to leave; only thereafter, for the entirety of the book, neither she nor her husband suggest he had any sort of involuntary ESP, as both continually operate from the perspective that he was utterly blind-sided by her sudden disappearance.
Can an object define itself from a false beginning? Or does that untrue step cause a thing to forever lose its way?
Elyria’s narration proves unreliable both from the pitfalls of her memory and psyche as well as the inconsistency born of sentences that shimmer beautifully but often don’t sync with the internal logic of their fictional world. The novel’s principal flaw and principal concern are one and the same: the inability to remain grounded in what came prior.
Looked at from a certain angle, this may not be a flaw at all.
As a seed of disharmony in their relationship, on their honeymoon Elyria’s husband tells her that she has “two options” with regard to how she can engage with her feelings. Elyria seethes under this binary, determined to prove that a galaxy of options exists. As the novel progresses, as Elyria fully removes herself from the mores and memories of her past, the existing narrative is left with only two possibilities: she will, or she will not. The irony and tragedy is that whichever arc she pursues, both come full circle to an identical end. - Nathan Huffstutter
In her daring début, Nobody Is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey puts into words the secret, unspoken desire so many of us harbor: to just leave your life and responsibilities without any explanation and go do something else. While few of us will ever actually do this, Nobody Is Ever Missing cuts deep and tries to understand why that desire persists.
The novel’s narrator, Elyria, is a 28-year-old soap opera writer who ups and leaves—without telling a soul—her comfortable life on the Upper West Side and her husband, a tenured professor of mathematics at Columbia University, to hitchhike in New Zealand and stay at a farm on a vague invitation from a poet she met once at a reading. The setup of a young woman traveling alone in an unfamiliar place may sound like the beginning of a thriller or horror flick, and Lacey certainly plays on the reader’s expectation of danger. When Elyria gets into “exactly the kind of car they say to avoid” with “a long-haired, bearded driver,” she muses: “This looked like the beginning of a porno or slasher movie and I didn’t want to be slashed or porned, but I did need to get about a hundred miles west of this parking lot and the sun was nearly setting and this car was the only one making an offer and I have always been unable to decline anyone’s offer of almost anything.” No gripping plot drives Lacey’s story, which subverts both the road novel, that staple of the literary old boys’ club, and the journey narrative—there isn’t much of a transformation at the end. Instead, what we have is a young woman’s paranoiac mind in search of something we may call a “self,” or perhaps a complete emptying of that self. “I’d still like, some mornings, to be the thing running far from me instead of sewn inside myself forever,” Elyria says. She spends the novel struggling to understand the “wildebeest” that lives inside her and that “told” her to “leave that perfectly nice apartment and absolutely suitable job and routines and husband who didn’t do anything completely awful.”
What makes Lacey’s novel more powerful and unsettling than the mere ramblings of a privileged white woman going through a quarter-life crisis is its unmistakably subversive tone. Elyria may be irritating and unreliable at times, as most interesting narrators usually are, and her travels may lead her back to the beginning, but she is still defying authority and a society that has pigeonholed her into the roles she has to play. “You’re one of those women who thinks nothing is good enough for you, the entire human existence is not good enough for you and you want something impossible,” Werner, the poet Elyria briefly stays with, tells her. But it’s not that simple.
Elyria is not satisfied with the options available to women because she knows that “nearly a majority of women had been, most likely, abused or assaulted or molested or whatever, and any woman who had not yet been abused or assaulted or molested or whatever should just wait, just give it a day or a year or a week or so because most likely it was going to happen to her.” While Nobody Is Ever Missing has a strong feminist undertow, it explores a variety of shackles that society binds us in: not just the political labels and economic barcodes constantly being stuck on each and every one of us, but also the bonds of love so many of us enter willingly. As Elyria puts it, “to love some is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria.” While Elyria comes to the conclusion that she “needs to be near people who don’t need” her, she also understands that that is an impossible wish and that loss is inevitable.
Lacey has written a melancholy and very funny novel in a serpentine and supple prose that can take a seemingly cliché phrase like “my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to” and manipulate it until it is utterly strange. By the end of the journey, the reader is disoriented enough to notice, like Elyria does, “how the earth and everything on it is ever and ever shaking, all the time.”
- Alisa Sniderman
Interview by Dwyer Murphy
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