“Nobody Is Ever Missing” Is a Study In Self Excavation

Ever since I read “Catcher in the Rye” by JD Salinger in high school, I’ve been enamored with the format of the stream of consciousness narrative. It’s just so cool to be with a character inside of their own head, tip-toeing around their thoughts and falling into their long, looping spirals of emotion as they navigate the world, or their memories. There is something so compelling about telling a story that way, entirely through the characters own biased sense of reality. It has been my favorite form to write in ever since.

“Nobody Is Ever Missing” by Catherine Lacey isn’t like any other stream of consciousness story I have ever read. The story is essentially a retelling of when the main character, Elyria, a married woman with a respectable job, runs away to New Zealand after realizing she feels completely unhappy in life. The way I’m describing this is oversimplifying it, really. The plot of her stay in New Zealand and struggle with reconciling her relationship with her husband is relatively simple in structure. The real story emerges in the narrator’s reflection on these events and the emotions and memories surrounding them. It is a deep dive into her psyche to salvage the wreckage of her life, a meandering walk through the fractured mind of someone grieving deeply.

At the heart of the story lies the central issue that Elyria’s adopted sister, with whom she shared her age, unexpectedly commits suicide by jumping out of her apartment window. This is something that Elyria will never get over, which rots her from the inside out, even while she falls in love with and marries the professor that last saw her sister alive. It is this mutual tragedy that originally connects them, then subsequently destroys them later on.

Anyways, Elyria runs away to New Zealand and begins living a hermit life where she’s alone with her thoughts, and she has a lot of them. One of the most compelling aspects of this book is the way its written, in long, rambling sentences that bring to mind the image of someone trying to say a very long thought in one breath. It’s a rush, pulling you along to read more and more, while simultaneously making you very exhausted. Almost as exhausted as the narrator is as she pulls each memory out from the depths and examines every painful corner in sharp detail. Here’s an example of one particularly striking passage toward the middle of the book:

Someone said once that they’d never heard of a crime they couldn’t imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing that rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing.

Elyria in “Nobody Is Ever Missing” by Catherine Lacey

Because of the tiring nature of each heavy chunk of thought the narrator gives us, I found myself having to digest this book in small bites, rather than bulldozing through it to get to the next plot point. That wasn’t the point of this book. The point was to work through all of the narrator’s incoherent feelings about her sister’s death, her failed marriage to her husband, and her subsequent mental breakdown that led her to flee to New Zealand for months, until she was forced to come back due to an injury and overstaying her travel visa. As I said before, the plot is simple, which is fine. If it was any more complicated, the book would have tried to tackle too much.

And while the lyrical, frantic voice of the novel was one of its best features, it was also one of its worst features because it made some sections of the book move too slowly and become frustrating to read. The narrator often repeats the same thoughts and ideas, which is realistic to how people think about things and process emotions, but doesn’t make for a smooth, enjoyable reading experience. Also, the lackluster ending left me wishing the conclusion had a little more impact. Then again, this book wasn’t about resolution, or satisfaction. It played out almost like a drawn out therapy session transcribed to help the narrator understand her own issues, which in and of itself made the book a worthwhile and interesting read.

While I enjoyed this book, I probably wouldn’t read it again and would give it a 3.5/5 for its thought-provoking prose.

I picked up another book by Catherine Lacey called “The Answers,” which was actually a coincidence, but I’ll leave a review here when I finish that one as well, so keep an eye out!