Meh

This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself.

Elyria has been married for 6 years when the story begins and she leaves home without telling anyone where she is going. Her husband, referred to as “husband” for most of the book, is a math professor who had worked with her sister Ruby before Ruby committed suicide. Ruby was brilliant and Elyria cannot come to terms with her death.

…the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it — that she’d be better off not living — and how was I supposed to live with that?

It isn’t clear at first what has prompted Elyria to leave for New Zealand, but as the novel progresses, her unstable state of mind, or what Elyria refers to as a battle with her inner wildebeest, becomes more and more evident. And the interminably long sentences, many going on for the length of a paragraph, multiply.

I am or we were (or still are) the kind of people who can never quite get away from our losses, the kind of people who don’t know that magic trick that other people seem to know — how to dissolve a sense of loss, how to unbraid it from a brain.

 

… to love someone 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….

 

… I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing — nobody is missing like that ….

When I read a novel, I have a habit of looking for themes, for some point that the author is trying to make. I’m not sure what that is for Nobody is Ever Missing. Perhaps it’s a portrait of mental illness and of how people end up homeless, but if so, it still felt like an incomplete picture to me. The ending left me perplexed. I hate to say it, but I just didn’t care much for this book.