Everything I Never Told You

by Celeste Ng

[clementine]

I found this book very quietly powerful. The portrait of a mixed race family, the exploration of what it's like to be visibly different in a small Midwestern town in the 60s and 70s, the loss of dreams under patriarchy... there are a lot of very big themes here which I think Ng absolutely did justice.

The characters are all so well-drawn and complete - they are flawed, they make big, hurtful mistakes, but they are so human that I couldn't help but truly feel for them. Unsurprisingly, I thought Marilyn was the most interesting character. To see such an intelligent, tenacious woman who wanted nothing more than to be a doctor reduced to the role of a housewife, and for her to try so hard to live vicariously through her daughter that she did not see how disastrous that pressure could become... it's heartbreaking. Actually, the most heartbreaking aspect of the novel is how singular all of these characters were in their pain, when if they'd just possessed the means to communicate they could have processed their traumas together. The breakdown in communication between James and Marilyn is painful, the loss of their daughter further splintering a relationship that has already been fractured by an inability to fundamentally understand each other. I can see why Ng chose to set the novel in the late 70s - because the racial difference between James and Marilyn would have been all the more pronounced then, and because Marilyn's stagnant lot in life is very much of that time.

I really dislike the trope of young female characters dying to further the development of other characters, so I was very heartened that Lydia was well-developed. Of course, the novel focuses a lot on the psychological workings of her family after her death, but she is not an afterthought or a convenient vehicle. She is a fully-developed character too, her death a tragic convergence of her family's dysfunction.

The entire novel felt stifling, and that's because all of its characters are stifled. Marilyn's ambitions find no outlet; James is not seen as a person but as a representation of his race; Lydia is a beacon of her parents' hopes and unrealized dreams, to the exclusion of her own desires; Nath and Hannah are largely ignored in favour of their sister. All of these characters have unrealized potential, and it seems that it's too late for the parents and Lydia. There is some hope, in the end, for Nath and Hannah, but it's still quite a bleak novel. Not bleak for the sake of being bleak, though, I don't think. Just lovely, all in all.