Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related to Berryman’s strange sense of guilt over his father’s suicide. At the heart of Catherine Lacey’s novel there is another suicide that brings with it enormous pain and grief, that of the heroine Elyria’s adopted sister Ruby, six years earlier.
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.
The bulk of the novel’s action takes place in New Zealand, but it could happen anywhere. Elyria has fled New York, a job writing soap operas and a marriage to her dead sister’s maths professor on the strength of a casual invitation from a poet called Werner who writes about ‘radical loneliness’ and believes that ‘misery begins in publishing’.
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