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.
