All those years of her daughter’s life, unmarked. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March.
She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. “The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. “With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. Take the moment Marilyn, Lydia’s mother, confidently goes to search the diaries she has given her daughter every year for over a decade: She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of the secrets the family members won’t share. The term literary thriller might make you scoff, but Ng has set two tasks in this novel’s doubled heart - to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. The mystery is why they can’t bring themselves to tell one another, or the police, what they believe is behind her disappearance. We watch instead as the police come to the Lees’ home to ask the uncomfortable questions - Was she doing well at school? Who were her friends? Did she seem depressed? Did she ever talk about hurting herself? - and her parents, sister and brother all find themselves unable to answer honestly. The mystery for the reader is not whether Lydia is still alive, or where she’s gone - we learn on the first page that Lydia is dead, her body found at the bottom of the lake. A blue-eyed Amerasian Susan Dey, the most white-looking of her siblings in her mixed-race Chinese and white family, she is also so serious, so driven, so good and responsible, she seems the least likely to go missing.
The missing girl is Lydia Lee, apple of her father’s eye, her mother’s favorite daughter. If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now. This is familiar territory, but Ng returns to it to spin an unfamiliar tale, with a very different kind of girl from the ones we’ve been asked to follow before.
The year is 1977, the setting, a quiet all-American town in Ohio, where everyone knows one another and nothing like this has ever happened before. Celeste Ng’s debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You,” is a literary thriller that begins with some stock elements: a missing girl, a lake, a local bad boy who was one of the last to see her and won’t say what he knows.
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