Customer Reviews

And Now You Can Go

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The reviews make this sound much more absorbing. It was fine, but not stunning.

While the story of Vida's character Ellis being held up by a Riverside Park assailant is not an earth-shattering one (there are clearly much worse things that can happen), I have read countless books that take a single, mundane incident and weave a fantastic tale of results, ripples, and unintended consequences. "Atonement" by Ian McEwan is one example. But this novel is not on that level. I wish it had been better.

Perhaps Ms. Vida's main character Ellis is blowing the incident with the gunman a bit out of proportion. I understand the scenario was disturbing, but I found Ellis's huffing and hawing about the event for some one hundred odd pages tiresome and annoying. And Now I Will Go.

Aside from the language being as superfical and as workshopped as can possibly be, the book reads as a Readers Digest story drawn out into a novel. There is no weight here. There is no urgency here. It feels completely constructed.

There is a reason why American Fiction is on its deathbed with publications such as the New York Times pulling fiction reviews and replacing them with nonfiction reviews, and its because of these abominable MFA books.

I had a horribly difficult time doing this review because in the end, I just didn't know what to say about the book. There is nothing there. You come away with nothing. Maybe this is a new(or the reigning) genre of Anti-literature.

I just barely made it through this book. I would have put it down, but I figured the rave reviews might have some merit. They didn't. The protagonist is shallow and self-conscious, and the novel lacks the subtlety of similar works--the prose was so pomo that I was thinking Vida is a pen name for David Foster Wallace--only it lacks David Foster Wallace's well-developed characters and interesting plots. Wait for it to show up in paperback, or browse through it at Borders.

Funny: when I read this book I had no idea Vendela Vida is married to David Eggers, but when I finish reading "And Now You Can Go" I had exactly the same reaction as when I gave up reading "A Hopeless Work of Staggering Hubris": Huh? I just don't get the literary acclaim. The writing is OK, but the story is dull, dull, dull. There's only one good thing I can say about Vida's novel: it's mercifully brief. I managed to read the 208 pages, which is more than I can say about her husband's work.

This is the worst novel I have ever read. It is laughingly bad, which almost makes it good. Nothing happens in it, save for a holdup. And not even a good holdup. Jsut a run-of-the-mill holdup.

Obviously, if you sleep with you-know-who, not only do you get a book published, but you get a literary magazine which helps intimidate the usual, useful idiots into giving good reviews. But the critics' lies can only go so far against Reality.

And so far, all the pomo indsiders have failed at creating characters bigger than themselves. Instead they have created caricatures of themselves.

Eternity is on truth's side, as thus as time goes by, the hypesters shall suffer in proportion to all they hype. This book will be forgotten. Don't waste your money on Knopf's vanity projects.

Ellis is a self-absorbed graduate student when she is accosted by the man with the gun; the man doesn't want money, he just wants to die and he wants someone to die with him. Somehow she keeps them both alive by talking, talking, talking, quoting poetry, and trying to get him into a bookstore. Then, suddenly he runs away.

The remainder of the book follows Ellis as she tries to deal with this experience, with her friends, with the police, with her room-mate, with a series of half-hearted affairs, and with a mediocre therapist. Along the way she reconnects with her family and follows her mother on a mission trip to the Phillipines. It's all a little loose, sometimes goofy, always unpredictable right up to the surprising ending.

I was hooked on this book from page one, but then, alas, in the aftermath to the incident, it began to drag. There were too many shallow characters, too many frivolous encounters, too little trauma. It was hard to connect with all these characters; hard to connect the events into a meaningful story. Still, author Vendela Vida has a good way with language, and the story is generally entertaining. If you're looking for a light-hearted read with an unusual angle, I can recommend this one. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.