“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” This is the first line of Everything I Never Told You,
Celeste Ng’s debut novel. It’s May 1977 in small-town Ohio and James, a
Chinese-American professor, and Marilyn, a white housewife, are going
about their married morning. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Lydia Lee is the
middle child and their favorite. Her younger sister Hannah is the first
to comment on Lydia’s absence, and it descends into horror from there.
Lydia’s body is found soon after; apparently she drowned in the lake
near their house. The Lees’ lives detonate, of course, but this story is
far from your typical “lost child” tale. How each person in Lydia’s
life absorbs the reality of her death is only a fraction of the
narrative, which is why I fell in love with it. Everything I Never Told
You is subtly exquisite.
I was drawn to this novel for many
reasons. First of all, it’s set in Ohio, where I’ve always lived. I’m
also fascinated by familial drama and the cultural atmosphere of the
1970s and the author’s name is lovely: Celeste Ng, pronounced ing. It’s
aesthetically and phonetically pleasing. And chiefly, it explores the
lives of an interracial couple and their children—being an
African-American with very fair skin, I grew up being identified and
treated like a multiracial person, even though I’m not (I have white
ancestry but it’s too far back to matter). Those feelings of isolation
and social anxiety and mild body dysmorphia forever in my marrow. The
various racially-charged interpersonal dramas. So what are you? What are
you? No one looking like me, not anywhere I looked, not ever. When the
local newspaper writes about Lydia after her death, they mention how
alone she was, how she didn’t have any friends, and the editorialist
always mentions directly before or after that she was the only Asian
girl at the school, that she stood out in the halls. No one looked like
her, not there, where she looked.
While Ng unveils the complex
inner life of our dead 16-year-old heroine, she deftly weaves in the
equally multifaceted inner lives of her family, sliding back and forth
in time and place. The ways that James, Marilyn, Nath, and Hannah loved
Lydia illuminates each of their fatal flaws. If this were a
Shakespearean tragedy they would all be dead by the end, except Hannah,
who would bear witness, being the shadow—the keen observer in their
quiet world of love and betrayal. Ng shifts focus expertly, without any
indication that we are changing perspective, except for the tender white
space between scenes.
We learn how very different difference
means to James and Marilyn, and how that shapes their parenting styles,
for better and for worse. James grew up as the perpetual outsider, being
Chinese in a sea of white classmates, being working poor among a sea of
middle-class and wealthy peers. This all contributes to his marrying
Marilyn. “This was the first reason he came to love her: because she had
blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and
utterly at home.”
For Marilyn, difference is salvation. She grew
up desperate to distinguish herself from her fiercely traditional
home-ec teacher mother, which illuminates her own initial feelings for
James, who came into her life as a young history professor. “How skinny
he was, she thought, how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer’s, his
skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun. She had never
seen anyone like him.” She was on her way to becoming a doctor before
she fell in love with James and became another pretty housewife, despite
her best efforts to avoid such a life. Years later, when she discovers
that she’s pregnant with their youngest, Hannah, and James comes to her,
“[e]verything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on
a breeze. She could not remember now why she thought it had all been
possible.”
These defeats and desires linger in their bones,
shaping how they raise their children. They do love them; they’re
positively drowning in it (no pun intended), but they betray them
anyway. Perhaps some form of betrayal is inevitable for everyone.
The atmosphere of this novel reminds me of one of my all-time favorite novels and film adaptations, The Virgin Suicides.
Thick and soft, silent, poisonous. The pulpy suffocation of the
parents. Lydia’s apparent and assumed virginal suicide. The way no one
truly knew her, like no one truly knew the Lisbon sisters. Everything I
Never Told You is the perfect title—it’s plump with every characters’
wretched, deafening secrets. Everyone is an iceberg—the vastness of them
hidden below their self-revealed surfaces.
In the midst of all
this, there’s Jack, Nath’s envy and enemy, and the only real friend
Lydia had. I won’t ruin the heart-rending twist in Jack’s story, but I
will say that he is there to the end, and he is more than he appears, to
Nath and Lydia alike, and I could see the twist coming, but it was
executed so flawlessly that I was still deliciously devastated.
Some
may say the ending is rushed, but I believe it was building
methodically to such a conclusion all along. It wasn’t a happy ending—it
wasn’t necessarily thrilling, but there is a release, a deep
exhalation, a sort of coalescing. So much of it is still vivid in my
mind now, days after reading it; that tortured glare of Jack’s with his
golden-tipped eyelashes, Hannah curled and absorbent under the kitchen
table, the Lees crossing the last name off a tidy list of teen girl
false friends, the tragic scent of lemons, Marilyn’s mother’s cookbook,
“the curve of Louisa’s back and the pale silk of her thighs and the
dark sweep of her hair,” Nath and the astronauts, Lydia’s silver heart
on a chain, the smell of the lake .This is a terrifically nuanced,
haunting novel that is practically begging for its own film adaptation.
Someone brilliant, please make my wish your command.
Review by Dawn West.
