Writing in a bold first-person voice, Catherine Lacey has made an auspicious debut with her first novel, NOBODY IS EVER MISSING.

Here is a harrowing portrait of a young woman named Elyria, who is struggling to escape from herself and her past into an impossible state of mere “presence” --- beyond identity --- that doesn’t involve any sort of interpersonal engagement or contingency. To achieve this conceptual state of grace, she leaves her comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that she shares with her husband Charles, a mathematics professor. Without warning him or anyone else, she flies to New Zealand to find Werner, a poet she once met who told her she could stay with him should she ever find herself on his home turf.

"Lacey’s prose, on its surface, is relatively simple, but she has created a dense, lyrical and startlingly original voice for Elyria... All told, NOBODY IS EVER MISSING is a powerhouse of a book, and one that assuredly can take its place in a continuum of feminist literature..."

Upon landing, and carrying only what she could fit in her backpack, along with a scrap of paper with Werner’s scribbled address, Elyria sets out hitchhiking in search of something that she can barely define. As she puts it, “It seemed to take a reason to be in a hurry and I didn’t have any reasons, I knew, and maybe that was it, maybe I had come to New Zealand to find a reason in this quiet country where everyone was happily waiting on almost nothing, to wait with them until a reason found me or I found a reason.”

As she travels around New Zealand, sleeping in hostels, strangers’ homes, parks and the occasional gardening shed, Elyria is forced to examine the events of her past that have led her to this desperate attempt at escape. At the root of her despair is the suicide of her deeply loved adopted sister, Ruby, the “renegade teenage genius.” Ruby, as it turns out, worked as an assistant to Charles, and Elyria and Charles met at the police station the day of Ruby’s death. From their grief and confusion, they embarked on a troubled relationship that started in a haze of infatuation and attraction but eventually dead-ended in an unfulfilling marriage. However, it gradually becomes apparent to Elyria that what she really wanted was a connection to someone else who had a connection to Ruby, someone who could keep her alive in some other way.

As Elyria’s tortured mind begins to unravel along her journey, more information about Charles surfaces that casts him in a menacing light --- unexplained night terrors, for instance, that result in him either waking up screaming or choking Elyria in his sleep. The succor she’d sought in marriage is revealed to be a trap designed to domesticate and neutralize the “wildebeests” that Elyria believes run rampant in all people, provoking, disrupting and threatening to burst forth in unstoppable, stampeding violence:

“…I don’t know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has --- because we all have them and there is a part of every human brain that just can’t bear and be, can’t sit up straight, can’t look you in the eye, can’t sit through time ticking… can’t be married….”

Lacey’s prose, on its surface, is relatively simple, but she has created a dense, lyrical and startlingly original voice for Elyria, one that can nimbly shift from profound despair to sardonic wit to a clear-eyed witnessing of the absurdity of existence. That said, the book’s momentum flags occasionally, and there are stretches where that painfully alert and anguished voice, worrying its worries in the relative safety of Elyria’s skull, can become a kind of agitated, quasi-autistic droning. But those instances are few.

All told, NOBODY IS EVER MISSING is a powerhouse of a book, and one that assuredly can take its place in a continuum of feminist literature, from the story of Bertha Mason’s tragic plight in JANE EYRE on through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella THE YELLOW WALLPAPER to Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE and beyond.