peteg's blog - noise - books - 2017 07 07 CatherineLacey NobodyIsEverMissing

Catherine Lacey: Nobody is ever missing. (2014)

Fri, Jul 07, 2017./noise/books | Link

Kindle. On Kate's recommendation, and perhaps the review in the New York Times of her newer The Answers. The plot and setting are entirely ancillary to the main game of rattling around in Lacey's head and enjoying her massively run-on sentences cut with fine observations. The title of the book is the self-realised slight revelation that it is now impossible to fully slip the chains of one's life; and of course the slightness of it is worked over at length. (There is far more than that however.) Lacey is most effective when she finds precisely the right few words to evoke a feeling, and less so when she merely asserts her emotional state, but most of the enjoyment came from her need to immediately rework each sentiment, striving to juice everything, struggling to own her responses and be original in a world that constructs new methods of stifling mental activity daily.

Dwight Garner.