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Everything I Never Told You
by Celeste Ng. Abacus 2014. (fiction; paperback; ISBN 978 0349 134284)
‘Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.’ It is the novel’s opening line, beginning almost where other novels might end. ‘They’, of course, are the teenager’s family, and to a great extent it is the thoughts, feelings, experiences and personal histories of the parents, Marilyn and James, and of the other children, Nath and Hannah, which the story richly explores. As much as all the grief and terrible sense of loss the family naturally feels, what troubles them and begins to pull this home apart, is the nagging question of why Lydia drowned in the nearby lake. The novel dispenses almost entirely with police procedures and officialdom in order to explore how the main characters try to explain this dreadful circumstance to themselves. The story is carefully told through their individual perspectives, for each has fragments of knowledge or understanding to contribute to the whole, until by the end the reader alone knows the ‘everything’ of the title.
Another interesting factor is that the family is Chinese-American, living in 1970s Ohio, and that – despite their various attempts to conform – society seems to marginalise them, contriving always to put them into some sort of normative box. The father, Professor James Lee, was born in the USA of Chinese parents, but is still asked the difference between a spring roll and an egg roll. Marilyn’s mother more or less disowns her son-in-law at the marriage ceremony. Brother and sister always sit together on the school bus. The pressure, it emerges, is on the one hand not to stand out as different, and on the other to excel beyond mere success. Hannah, the youngest daughter, while spared the pressure, is meanwhile given little love or attention.
Everything I never Told You is a moving and rewarding tale, whose measured pace allows the reader to piece together meaning without simple attributions of blame. I look forward to reading the author’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), which has received similar praise.
Ray