![]() Both struggle with personal demons of otherness, isolation, and bigotry. The story brings together James, a son of Chinese immigrants and a future professor of American History, and Marilyn, an aspiring physicist and doctor. ![]() She builds a decades-long cultural history of racism and misogyny compounding in Lydia such that her young end is ultimately ordained before she was even born.Īfter Lydia’s death, Ng starts to fill in the family’s backstory in a carefully patterned weave of past and present. The characters are predestined for death before the reader even meets them. ![]() Tartt channels the apocalyptic fate of Greek tragedy in Bunny’s death, and Marquez invokes Christian salvation in Santiago Nasar’s premonitory demise. For Ng, like Tart and Marquez, inverting the story turns prevention into inevitability. Murder mysteries are about retroactive prevention: if we knew all the pieces and clues earlier, lives would have been saved. ![]() ![]() The opening of Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, is an inversion of the classic “who-dunnit?” From the opening line Ng reveals that Lydia Lee’s death was a suicide, if an unlikely one, which leaves us instead to ask, “why?” This format, executed successfully, has tremendous power, such as Donna Tartt showing us Bunny Corocan’s frozen corpse at the start of The Secret History or Santiago Nasar waking early on the day he will die at the beginning of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. ![]()
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