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. There's significant talent at work here…"Nobody Is Ever Missing" gets so much right that you easily push past its small flaws. Lacey's debut introduces us to Elyria, who takes off from her stable American life to go live in New Zealand. . One salient thing about “Nobody Is Ever Missing” is that Elly, even at 28, is so much more girl than woman. Elyria, hitchhiking, steps into the kind of damaged car she knows should terrify her. “She spoke to me like I was a child, which was fine because I wanted to be one,” Elly says at one point. She works for CBS, writing soap operas.
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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”?
Her mother is a drunk. 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 .
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. 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. . . . NOBODY IS EVER MISSING. “Nobody Is Ever Missing” is composed mostly of long, languid sentences that push into the night like headlights. 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.” —Nathan Huffstutter, “Catherine Lacey's debut novel explores that deeply human question... She holds the reader rapt for 244 pages, vividly situating us--entrapping us, really.” —“Catherine Lacey's remarkably immersive and morbidly humorous debut, “My copy of Catherine Lacey's debut novel is dog-eared to the degree of making all those folded corners pointless. 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 Let me show her off by zeroing in on one scene. 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”? It's an aching portrait of a young woman doing the hard thing, "trying to think clearly about mixed feelings.” —“This is how much I liked Catherine Lacey's debut novel, “The premise begins simply enough: Elyria has unexpectedly left her husband. Just as often, they are improbably beautiful, or simply cool and knowing.