The End of Everything

The End of Everything is the Megan Abbott novel I find hardest to talk about, because the whole book operates on the line between adolescent friendship and something the adult world cannot yet name. The narrator is Lizzie, thirteen, who watches her best friend Evie get into a car and not come home. The investigation that follows is the framework. The interior of Lizzie's head is the book.

Abbott is doing several things at once. She is writing about the specific, dense charge between two girls on the edge of adolescence. She is writing about how families fail to see what they need to see. She is writing about how a missing-child case looks from inside a household when the child is not yours but your friend's. None of these get foregrounded with capital letters. They just accumulate.

The prose is the densest Abbott has written. Reading the book feels like being in a hot room that you cannot leave. The closing pages land with a calm that is more disturbing than violence would be.

Five stars, with the warning that the book deals with the seduction of a minor as its central matter. Abbott handles it with care and seriousness. It is still hard to read in the way it should be.