“Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place” is a now-shocking headline in the newspaper coverage of Lydia’s funeral. The story-driving decisions made by the characters, meanwhile, are almost all driven by overt racism of the sort that mixed-race families would have faced then rather than the covert and coded bigotry that is more common now. Ng’s narrative depends on Lydia having left little trace and misleading her parents about key friendships – feats nearly impossible since the advent of mobile phones and Facebook.

The choice of a 70s setting is an indicator of the damage that modern technology and ideological progress have done to the plotting options of crime writers. The book opens in 1977, with chapters taking place in that year alternating with sections set in the mid 60s, when a previous crisis – also involving a missing person – struck the Lee family, which comprises James, a Chinese-American history professor at an Ohio college, his wife Marilyn, a Yankee-American medical school dropout, and their three children. By the third of the 12 chapters, though, it is apparent that there is much here that might impress Pulitzer and Man Booker judges as well as the panellists of an online bookseller. The repeated word “gone” tolls through the prose like a funeral bell and you begin to congratulate the publisher for its impressive self-control in not simply retitling the book Girl, Gone in order to maximise its appeal. Everything I Never Told You starts, as now seems to be statutory for almost all crime stories on page and screen, with a sudden disappearance: in this case, teenager Lydia Lee, who is soon found dead in a lake, drowned by either suicide or murder. In their list of the 100 best books of the year, announced last week, the editors expressed hope that awarding the top slot to Celeste Ng’s debut novel will help it become “the blockbuster it deserves to be”, hints that saleability and marketing may be at least as important as literary quality.Īnd, at first, such cynicism seems justified. A lthough no literary prize can claim scientific objectivity for its judgments, one might be suspicious of a trophy given by Amazon.

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