Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

I don’t know about you, but I tend to go through phases in terms of the books I purchase.  For a couple years I pretty much exclusively bought and consumed Japanese fiction, and before that I read detective thrillers by authors like Lincoln Child and Brad Meltzer.  When I bought Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, I would tentatively describe my buying habits as “Gone Girl-inspired.”  Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl had already made a literary splash, and although I had not read it (and still have not, for that matter, though it’s on my to-read shelf now), I was very interested in the crop of mysterious chick-lit-esque books that were published in its wake.  This interest combined with my aforementioned affection for Asian literature led me Everything I Never Told You.

Everything grips the reader from the very first lines: “Lydia is dead.  But they don’t know this yet.”  Lydia, as the reader soon comes to know, has been found drowned in a lake, the victim of an apparent suicide.  But what could cause a seemingly happy, popular and ambitious high school student with dreams of becoming a doctor to commit suicide?  It is in attempting to answer this question that Ng commences her examination of interactions of Lydia’s family, a Chinese history professor, his white American wife and their mixed-race children, among whom Lydia is the beloved and highly favored golden child.  It quickly becomes apparent that family relations are not as placid as they originally appeared, and that Lydia was not the person her parents believed her to be.  More information is slowly revealed as each family member copes with Lydia’s passing, from little sister Hannah, who has always been ignored in light of her elder siblings’ accomplishments, to mother Marilyn, who may have foisted her own dreams of higher education onto her daughter’s shoulders.

I expected this novel to play out structurally more like The Lovely Bones (a favorite of mine, link to Amazon here), with the reader knowing all details of Lydia’s death from the start and watching the family struggle to accept their own limited understanding.  While this did hold true to some extent, Ng did a remarkable job of revealing information about Lydia’s life in a slow and deliberate fashion.  Even though Lydia’s death looked like a suicide from the start, she was able to keep me guessing until the end: could someone else have been at the pier that night?  Why would she jump in the water?  I will not spoil the ending, but I appreciated Ng’s ability to retain an element of suspense amid the familial drama that lay at the heart of the novel.

I would recommend Everything I Never Told You to readers who enjoy novels with a lot of emotional depth.  The story was less of a thriller than I expected, instead turning out to be more a family drama, but still elicited a range of emotions, and also had some of the same “unreliable narrator” qualities that I have heard were so beloved in Gone Girl.  I think that readers who enjoy Asian American fiction would like this story for its portrayal of an Asian American family, and for that matter, readers who enjoy realistic depictions of multi-ethnic families would also find something to love in this book.

PSA:  I am currently reading a classic split into four volumes, which I plan to review as a whole upon its completion.  Bonus points if you can guess what it is, but it’s not from the English-language literary tradition!  At any rate, please be patient for my next post.