...[an] exhausting yet propulsive debut ... We are in the company of a mind relentlessly interrogating itself, in the tradition of Beckett and now Eimear McBride, but with its own singular flavour ... Catherine Lacey keeps the narrative perspective strictly internal, making the reader experience rather than observe the book’s events. Though there are suggestions of mental illness in Elyria’s paranoia and fears of psychic contamination, the book’s main motors – how to accommodate emotional damage within a relationship; the ongoing present tense of bereavement and family trauma; the question of how much solitude will drive any given individual crazy – are universal. Painful it may be, but the book is also wry, surprising and blackly funny, a queasily intimate travelogue of inner and outer journeys. In her portrait of a mind under pressure, tying itself in knots, hovering between overwhelming sensation and disassociated numbness, Lacey has produced a novel of uncomfortable power.
...[a] laser smart, affecting, confounding, recalcitrant, infuriating, relentlessly stylish debut novel ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
...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 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...we have reached the idiosyncratic heart of the human mystery: we know this person profoundly well, but she might surprise us at any minute ... Lacey has written a postmodern existential novel ... 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 ... 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.
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 ... 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 ... 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 ... Ms. Lacey’s slim novel impressed me, and held me to my chair. There’s significant talent at work here ... 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.'
...[The] 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 ... 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 ... Lacey adroitly treads the line between the poignant and the comic, and evokes beautifully the weird intrusiveness of memory, its suddenness and randomness ... Her language pulses and breathes, and although she periodically pushes it a beat too far ... In the course of one passage, she can flit from disaffection and despond to absurdity and tenderness and back again ... [a] wise and dazzling novel...
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 ... 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 .... 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 ... 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.
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 ... 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 ... 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.'
This is a novel of extremes — to put it mildly — charting Elyria’s slide into a derelict state. It is a witty, knowing and lyrical work that takes as its subject the thoughts and feelings of a woman who has suffered more misery than most humans can take ... This book won’t tickle everyone. Sometimes I felt that Lacey requires her reader to become the less interesting yet devoted best friend/nursemaid/confidante to Elyria and her rather stylishly expressed troubles...But my ungallant feelings soon melted to awe, and compassion for the compelling character that Lacey has created — a woman who is living, as Berryman himself often did, right at the very edge of things. here is much impressive writing here. Lacey excels at describing the way a shaky soul locates strange meanings everywhere ... If Nobody is Ever Missing occasionally grates or seems precious ...it still contains a terrific amount of insight into agony and courage, and suffering with style.
While Nobody Is Ever Missing could blandly be called another 'postmodern' novel, it better unfolds a map of navigating postmodern life, which we’ve come to define as the perpetual unraveling of identity, purpose, and passion in a life of frank uncertainty ... A novel that begins with the exodus of one woman and her multifarious identity crises, Catherine Lacey’s debut work is a blend of upper class ennui, existential crisis, and the variant traumas of human existence. Of course it’s alternately comedic and tragic, of course it’s clever and self-conscious about its own cleverness, and of course it slips into insight in the midst of its most desperate insecurities. But Elyria is in contest with the personal certainty that 'no one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake,' and to still her life, even after returning to New York, would be a simplified plot line she’d only write for her soap opera.
Catherine Lacey's debut novel explores that deeply human question — for many, a passing thought; for others, more nagging: 'What if I were to suddenly change the course of my life?' ... Lacey's writing is a tumult of run-on sentences: assured, poetic, unspooling with intensity. She holds the reader rapt for 244 pages, vividly situating us — entrapping us, really — in the brain of someone whose thoughts and actions are increasingly less stable ... the immediacy and inventiveness of Lacey's prose makes it invigorating.
Lacey’s debut novel has emotional power, depth, and subtle humor ... 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.
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 ... 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.
