CATHERINE LACEY'S 'NOBODY IS EVER MISSING'

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.”

Nobody Is Ever Missing is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Alisa Sniderman is a writer based in New York. Her writing has appeared in Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Sydney Morning Herald, and elsewhere.

Prabal Gurung's New Book

The Nepalese designer celebrates a decade of championing diversity, inclusion, and a world made “stronger through color” with his vibrant clothing in his first monograph.

Avan Jogia Follows Wherever His Curiosity Leads

With roles in Gregg Araki’s new series Now Apocalypse and this week’s Shaft reboot along with a forthcoming book of poetry and directorial début, the former Nickelodeon star continues to celebrate the freedom to explore and experiment creatively.

Tonne Goodman Shares Her 'Point of View'

In her new book, the celebrated former Vogue fashion director shares images from her childhood, her modeling career, and her family life, along with the countless editorials, advertisements, and covers to which she has lent her crisp eye over the years.

Ethan James Green Photographs 'Young New York'

In his first book, the young photographer shares a personal project of eloquent black-and-white portraits of New York’s trans, non-binary, and queer community.

Lola & Pani Find Brotherhood in 'Northern Rivers'

In their new book, the London-based photographer duo capture a crew of lifelong friends over the course of a seemingly endless summer in Australia.

FUMI NAGASAKA STARTS A 'TEENAGE RIOT'

In her second book, the Japanese photographer captures the individual personalities and æsthetics of four adolescent girls in their hometowns in a collection that is both intimate and anthropological.

RO KWON ON CULTS AND YOUNG LOVE IN 'THE INCENDIARIES'

In her propulsive début novel, ten years in the making, the author ponders the unfathomability of others in the tale of a young woman who joins a cult.

MARTIN ZÄHRINGER GOES FISHING WITH JOHN BAKER

In his first book, the London-based photographer documents every facet of the life of a Barbadian fisherman with whom he felt an immediate kinship, acting as both visitor and companion.

MARIO SORRENTI SHOWS A NEW SIDE OF KATE MOSS

In a new book of previously unreleased photographs, the famed photographer spotlights the iconic model’s innocence from their days of youthful love.

SEBASTIAN BECKWITH DEMYSTIFIES TEA

In his first book, the In Pursuit of Tea founder shares twenty-plus years of experience in a mix of history, cultural study, and instruction manual.

SKATER-SLASH-PHOTOGRAPHER IAN KENNETH BIRD HEADS INTO THE STUDIO

After making his name capturing his friends skating around East London, the British photographer opts for the purity of a white studio for his latest book, Untitled Portraits.

PHOTOGRAPHER NICOLAS KERN CAPTURES THE "CONSTANT NOW" IN HIS BOOK 'ZEITGEISTER'

The photographer finds intimate moments in the juxtaposition between the soon-to-be-extinct medium of large-format instant photography and over sixty new faces shot over just four days.

TYLER WETHERALL TURNS HISTORY INTO MEMORY IN HER MEMOR 'NO WAY HOME'

In her début memoir, the young author recounts a life growing up the child of a convicted pot smuggler and fugitive from the law, reinforcing her relationship with her father and exploring the process of alchemizing her own past into memory.

ADRIAN GAUT PHOTOGRAPHS ALONG WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

In his first book, the photographer captures one of Los Angeles’s iconic thoroughfares with an eye to abstract imagery, finding coherence in Southern California’s diverse sprawl.

MATS GUSTAFSON ILLUSTRATES THE BODY'S FRAGILITY IN 'NUDE'

In a book of watercolors, the Swedish artist and illustrator turns away from his fashion work for more intimate portraits that reflect the fragility of the human body as a protest against the slow response to the AIDS crisis.

NEW YORK BY THE LAST MAGAZINE: AUTHOR ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN SAYS WRITING IS LIKE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME

In her novel and short stories, the Staten Island-based author probes the border between science and literature with discomfiting tales about the body and its relationship to the perilous world around it.

HERMIONE HOBY'S 'NEON IN DAYLIGHT' REINVENTS THE NEW YORK NOVEL FOR A NEW AGE

In her début novel, the young British author ponders questions of selfhood and power dynamics in a thoughtful bildungsroman set during a sweltering New York summer.

SALLY ROONEY TALKS TO HER FRIENDS

In her sparkling début novel, the Irish author questions power dynamics and imbalances of privilege while reflecting on communication in the digital age.