And Now You Can Go [Paperback]

Venlela Vida (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2004

A gun is pointed at 21-year-old Ellis as she walks through a New York park. Although she escapes unharmed she is left psychologically reeling. Over the next few weeks Ellis keeps everyone at bay: the police, suitors who want to save her, and the university therapist who hints that her sweaters are too tight. But when Ellis accompanies her mother, a nurse, on a mission in the Philippines, she finds the life - even if held up - cannot be held back, and neither, finally, can she.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The premise of Vendela Vida's terrific debut novel, And Now You Can Go, seems at first a tad depressing, in a Bernard Goetz, New-York-in-the-1980s kind of way. The narrator, a young woman named Ellis, is walking in Riverside Park when she is held up at gunpoint. The man assures her he doesn't want her money, and he doesn't push her into the bushes to rape her. Ellis notices the designer name on his glasses: Giorgio Armani; she begins to obsess on this detail. Then she starts to recite poetry to him to cheer him up about life. The encounter ends as abruptly as it began, when the man simply runs away down the street. Even though no blood has been shed, Ellis's life is utterly changed.

In fast, clean, funny prose, we find Ellis slipping adrift from her routine as a Columbia grad student and falling into a series of mini-romances. When she goes home to San Francisco for winter break, her mom suggests Ellis join her on a medical mission to the Philippines. The work and the heat and the exhaustion settle her down for the first time since the attack, and she returns to New York a little refreshed. There's one more encounter with the gunman, which Vida plays more comic than tragic. In fact, the strength of this novel is in the way Vida toys with her priorities. The scenes that ought to be fraught and suspenseful have a goofy kind of oh-well voice to them; the scenes that ought to be dull--like Ellis's run-ins with her annoying roommate--exert a weirdly compelling narrative drive. Both the author and her protagonist charm us utterly. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Ellis, the 21-year-old narrator of Vida's lean, absorbing first novel, is forced at gunpoint to sit and talk with a man in a New York City park as he contemplates a murder/suicide. Like Scheherazade, she reels off half-remembered poems to try to distract the man and keep herself alive. Though nothing more happens on that park bench, she carries on as if treading water in an emotional whirlpool, waiting to get sucked under. A grad student at Columbia, Ellis goes through the various routines expected of the victim of violent crime: reporting the event to the campus police, seeking succor from friends, going to a therapist. But the problem of how to define herself-as a victim or not-lingers and begins to seep into other parts of her life. She ricochets among a handful of men: Tom, her well-meaning but needy boyfriend; the nameless "representative of the world," an enigmatic grad student; a rich, suicidal ex; and her only potential savior, a colorful, if chauvinistic, ROTC recruit full of chivalric gestures and inappropriate comments. Frustrated, Ellis returns to her home in San Francisco and then accompanies her mother on a charitable trip to the Philippines, where, in a series of surreal vignettes, she assists doctors giving eye surgery to the poor. While a more conventional novel would use this trip as a denouement-a kind of reconciliation with her own privilege-here it merely underscores the narrator's dreamlike detachment. Despite the high drama of the start, this is an unsentimental tale, in which the classic brush with death elicits a sense of awe as well as anger, and conventional notions of therapy and reconciliation are overturned. The end, unfortunately, arrives just as the book began-abruptly-and the reader longs for something more. Nevertheless, this remains an intriguing and auspicious debut.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Random House (September 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099452146
• ISBN-13: 978-0099452140
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,768,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More a superior longer story than a novel, September 9, 2004

By 

kardra (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: And Now You Can Go: A Novel (Paperback)

If you believe some of the reviewers here, creative writing (MFA) courses at American universities either remove any innate literary imagination and originality, or many of the students who successfully complete them don't possess any in the first place. At any rate, I'm not in any way competent to comment on the subject. I have grasped though that there's a lot of antagonism against Dave Eggers and the group of writers associated with his (defunct?) McSweeney's magazine, of which Vendela Vida is a part. Ignoring that, Vida's novel And Now You Can Go was interesting enough to me mostly because of the subtle humour and main character Ellis's inscrutability, which doesn't let up throughout the story. Vida's style has been passed off by some here as merely superficial and vapid, but I actually find that she convincingly describes a thoughtful, ironic woman in her early 20s, right about now. I think the story holds up as mild satire (the jaunt to the Philippines certainly contributes to that impression) but I agree with the oft-repeated criticism as to the choice of longer narrative form: And Now You Can Go would work better as a short story than a novel, or even novella. Some of the harsher critics go so far as to relegate this book to the 'Cosmo' or 'JANE' magazine fiction scrap heap. This I think is unfair: I would say Vida is a more serious, imaginative, talented writer than that.

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Most Overhyped Book of The Year, November 15, 2003

By 

Christy Thompson (Jersey City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: And Now You Can Go (Hardcover)

I saw about eight million reviews of this book, so I bought it. Somebody needs to be sued. This is a classic pump-and-dump scheme. Vida must have some serious connections in the publishing world.

In the novel a single incident happens. Someone gets held up at gunpoint. End of story. But no. She writes an entire novel about it. This is the only thing that happens for a couple hundred pages. I'm not kidding. She wrote a whole damn novel based on one event. Boring.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing., October 14, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: And Now You Can Go (Hardcover)

It is really hard to read while rolling your eyes. Vida's writing in this novel is uneven, which makes reading about the vapid grad students rather unpleasant. The best thing about this book is that it isn't very long. You can read it in a couple hours if you must.