‘What’s your trouble? Tell me your trouble, baby.” Without a word to her husband and with only the rucksack on her back, Elyria has walked out of her comfortable New York life and is on her way to a rural backwater in New Zealand when the first of many curious strangers asks her the critical question. “I looked back at him like I didn’t have any trouble to tell, because that’s my trouble, I thought, not knowing how to tell it.”
But she tries for the rest of this exhausting yet propulsive debut, worrying away at what there is to tell, as well as how, and why, and whether it is even possible in the first place. We are in the company of a mind relentlessly interrogating itself, in the tradition of Beckett and now Eimear McBride, but with its own singular flavour. As the book opens, the reader is as lost in Elyria’s thoughts as she is herself: all she knows is that her present situation is unbearable, she is in need of a “small and manageable life”, and has for some reason fixated on the half-hearted offer of a spare room on the other side of the world from a poet she met at a party.
Numbly, then, she boards a plane and wends her way across New Zealand, hitchhiking, walking aimlessly, sleeping in barns, so immersed in her own anguish that the glimpses we get of this strange new country are absurdly flattened: “a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not”. Strangers repeatedly mistake her terror for bravery: “stay away from those bloody blokes,” warn the women drivers, while both sexes advise her against getting raped and murdered. She meets oddballs, bores and Good Samaritans, but her self-absorption acts as a repelling force field; the sanctuary she was sure she would find on the poet’s farm is not forthcoming (“You are a sad person, he said, and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness”). When she eventually calls her husband and mother, their responses cut her loose rather than reeling her home, and she continues her efforts to vanish from her own life. It’s a futile quest, of course: as the title states, no one can ever go missing from themselves.
And gradually the story Elyria carries with her comes out: the suicide of her adopted sister; the shared pain that brought her and her husband together, and the solitary pains that are pushing them apart; her terrible, drunken mother, who has passed on to Elyria many other burdens in addition to her flowery name. But this backstory is not intended to explain Elyria, or lead the book to any sort of resolution; Catherine Lacey keeps the narrative perspective strictly internal, making the reader experience rather than observe the book’s events. Though there are suggestions of mental illness in Elyria’s paranoia and fears of psychic contamination, the book’s main motors – how to accommodate emotional damage within a relationship; the ongoing present tense of bereavement and family trauma; the question of how much solitude will drive any given individual crazy – are universal.
Painful it may be, but the book is also wry, surprising and blackly funny, a queasily intimate travelogue of inner and outer journeys. In her portrait of a mind under pressure, tying itself in knots, hovering between overwhelming sensation and disassociated numbness, Lacey has produced a novel of uncomfortable power.
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