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Vendela Vida’s initiation rite
BY CLEA SIMON
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And Now You Can Go
By Vendela Vida, Alfred A. Knopf, 200 pages, $19.95.
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What would happen to a person who was a victim of a crime but to whom no physical or fiscal harm had been done? What would the implications of threatened violence be? That’s the premise of Vendela Vida’s brief but addictive first novel, And Now You Can Go, a sort of character study of post-traumatic stress disorder as it plays out in the life of one young graduate student in New York. On a clear December afternoon, 21-year-old Ellis, a newcomer to the city, is approached by a polite young man in Riverside Park. He’s wearing Giorgio Armani glasses, she notes, and is carrying a gun, which he points at her. He wants to die, he tells her, but he doesn’t want to die alone, and with his gun he gestures for her to join him on a park bench, where he holds the weapon to her head. In reaction, Ellis, scrambling for time, begins to talk. "There’s so much good stuff out there," she tells her would-be assailant, frantically, noting in an aside to the reader, "I feel like a cheerleader gone haywire." She hits on poetry, which she recites as the gunman begins to listen to her. When she forgets the end of a poem, she suggests they go look it up, envisioning a crowded bookstore where she can ask for help. There’s no need: as the two begin to walk, he puts his gun away. "Look, you can run now. You can go and do whatever you want," he says to her. The trouble is, Ellis can’t. Although she hurries away from the gunman without further incident, the effect of the encounter isn’t as easily escaped. The random violence of the day sends out ripples that upset almost every aspect of her life. Some of these Ellis is made immediately aware of, such as the new role of law-enforcement officials in her life. "It’s for you," says her roommate when seven policemen show up at their apartment. "I wonder if this is how it will be from now on," muses Ellis with a believable mix of resignation and resentment; "whenever there are policemen at the door we’ll assume they’re for me." In time, a therapist points out the distancing rituals other people use to make themselves feel safe — for example, the friend who told Ellis that she should "never walk in the park," tacitly blaming her for the encounter. "Next time just stop them and tell them that that response isn’t helpful to you," the therapist advises. Less easy to dismiss, however, are the aftershocks that Ellis can’t identify. There’s the "sharp smell" that she notices in her apartment, a smell that nobody else seems to sense and that resembles the garlicky odor of the gun. There is her new appeal to a certain type of man, a type she identifies in such sketchy terms as "the coyote man" and "the ROTC boy": one seems drawn to her sense of shock and the other wants to do violence to avenge her. Neither ever takes on the substance that her boyfriend, Tom, and her ex, Nick, have, and as Ellis caroms from one to another, it becomes clear that these interactions are symptoms rather than relationships. Underneath it all is her confusion about the event — and how she can recover. "Was what happened in the park a big deal or not? Big deal, not a big deal. Big deal, not a big deal, I say in my head over and over, like a girl plucking off petals from a daisy." This confusion seeps into her life like that disturbing smell, at times threatening to dominate the straightforward first-person narrative. What the trauma — and that does seem to be the right word — also uncovers is an earlier disruption in Ellis’s life, the mysterious disappearance of her father. That he returned to his family after four years doesn’t make his abandoning them any less real, and this earlier loss — along with subplots involving the suicidal Nick and various life crises of others close to her — complicates Ellis’s recovery. These are all woven together with a light hand, as Vida (an editor of the literary magazine the Believer) creates a complex but sympathetic heroine on a voyage and entices you to follow. Vida’s first book, the non-fiction Girls on the Verge (Griffin), explored girls’ initiation rituals. Growing out of the author’s MFA thesis for Columbia University, that book covered a range of time-marking events, from gang violence to debutante balls, and echoes of it can be found in And Now You Can Go. Ellis is neither gangster or socialite, but she’s changed by her experience. You wind up rooting for her to come out on the other side, stronger if not unscarred. Vendela Vida reads at WordsWorth, 30 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, on September 15 at 7 p.m.; call (617) 354-5201.
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