And Now You Can Go

by Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida’s fearless, critically acclaimed fiction debut follows the unpredictable recovery of a young woman as she tries to make sense of her life after an encounter at gunpoint.

Accosted one afternoon in Riverside Park by a man who doesn't want to die alone, Ellis, a young grad student, talks her way out of the situation by reciting poetry to her desperate captor. He lets her go, but is she free? Rejecting the overtures of her kind-hearted boyfriend, the police, and the suitors who would like to save her, Ellis finds herself unable to escape the event. She leaves the city to visit her family; joins her mother on a medical mission to the Philippines. When she returns, Ellis discovers something more about life–perhaps even how to take back her own.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, New York, Female Authors, Crime, Literary Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2003

About the author

Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of four books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers, and a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She is also the co-editor of Always Apprentices, a collection of interviews with writers, and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. As a fellow at the Sundance Labs, she developed Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name into a script, which received the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award. Two of Vida’s novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the year, and she is the winner of the Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two children, and since 2002 has served on the board of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring lab for youth.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

2015 was the year of Vendela Vida for me; I discovered this author's books and can't get enough of them.

Having read several of her more recent works before getting around to reading this, her debut, I was already aware that Vida writes variations on a theme. That theme goes a little something like this: woman is confronted with shocking news or experience that jolts the foundation of her identity and is somewhat isolating, then seeks to develop coping, self-soothe, restore equilibrium and sense of self. Strenuous exotic travel usually plays some role in some part of this, but Vida is also a master of detailing the day-to-day and uncovering the epic nature of the taken-for-granted quotidian grind.

The formula I just detailed is reductive, but make no mistake about it: Vida is not formulaic, and this novel is magnificent. Ellis, or El, a young art history grad student at Columbia, has a brief, violent encounter with a man in Riverside Park. (I won't say more about the encounter so as to avoid spoilers, but I want to clarify that it does NOT involve sexual violence. Gendered violence: now perhaps.) El creatively (literally) survives the encounter, yet it alters her relationship with herself and with virtually everything in her life, especially with those in her limited social circle of students, school personnel, and building superintendents - and, of these, especially with men, including current, past, would be and erstwhile "boyfriends." The book provides a wonderfully realistic depiction of post-traumatic stress and especially the isolation and anger a survivor might experience when confronted with others' discomfort with the violence, which manifests in a spectrum of ways from victim-blaming to offers of violent vengeance.

We learn that Ellis's immigrant mom named her for Ellis Island, and the name is significant: we quickly see that, just like the needy man in the park, other men in her life seem to try to colonize her or to project upon her their often violent wants and desires, whether spiritual, physical, or existential. Ellis is initially rather passive, but learns through her violent encounter and throughout her recovery process to better discern the intentions of the men around her and to absolve herself of the responsibility for being their "promised land." Once Ellis begins to see herself as less of a vehicle and more of an agent, she is able to switch focus from her perceived personal weaknesses to her personal strengths - from "what about her made her a victim" to "what positive qualities and powers of hers allowed her to survive." And from there, she is able to attain healing and to think in sophisticated and perhaps controversial ways about forgiveness.

This all sounds very heavy, but I should mention that Vendela Vida books are also fucking funny, and fun. They are suspenseful page-turners like the best of genre fiction, and I suppose they are indeed literary psychological thrillers. In fact, I might say they transcend page-turning; I've read three of her books and noticed the same phenomenon each time: the book reads so easily and effortlessly that it seems to be reading itself. They are really immersive and remind me of a great cinéma vérité film in which the whole thing is one long smooth single camera shot. Reading Vida's books reminds me of the feeling you get in those dreams where you can fly.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Try as I might, I couldn't finish this novel. It has a gripping opening scene, but then the story flounders so much that I got frustrated and finally abandoned it midway through.

I picked up this book for two reasons: First, I had really liked Vendela Vida's novel The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, and second, because I recently read a column by Vida in The New York Times in which she discussed the overlap between truth and fiction. It turns out that the incident of a woman having her bag and identity stolen at a foreign airport, which is what sets the plot of Diver's Clothes in motion, really happened to Vida. The incredible story that opens And Now You Can Go also happened to Vida.

The opening scene is that a young woman, Ellis, is walking through a park in New York City when a man with a gun approaches her and says he wants to die, but he doesn't want to die alone. They sit on a park bench, and, with a gun pointed at her head, Ellis nervously starts talking about the good things to live for, including poetry. This catches the gunman by surprise, and Ellis starts reciting some poetry, then offers to take him to a nearby bookstore and show him more poems. The gunman agrees, but then runs away, leaving Ellis alone and unharmed.

I had the benefit of reading that scene knowing that a similar incident had happened to the author, and it gave the prose even more power. After she escapes, Ellis is interviewed by the police, and she tries to find comfort in her work and her friends, but she flails and flits from one guy to the next. The novel didn't have chapters, just a series of short scenes, and these vignettes didn't always flow well. At times the scenes were jarring in how they jumped from one to the next, and I had to regularly go back and reread a page or two, trying to figure out what I had missed. But I hadn't missed anything — the plot was just that jumpy.

The blurb on the book jacket indicates that eventually Ellis gets back into the swing of life, but I didn't have the patience to wait around for it. Maybe you will like this book more.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think And Now You Can Go suffered from first-novel syndrome, at least for me. Unlike Vida’s later books, this one seemed to obfuscate purely for the sake of making things seem more complex. Why the unnecessary fly paper in Ellis’s apartment, for example? Why does she keep attracting random men in the wake of her traumatic experience, and why does she spend time with them? In her situation I’d be more inclined to stay away from random men for a while (and I think Vida’s later heroines would feel the same). It’s definitely possible there’s a deeper psychological explanation that I’m missing, but the whole thing felt rather aimless to me—and when Ellis finally does go on a trip, it felt not only a bit incongruous to me, but also unconvincingly sentimental, the redemption somewhat forced. I don’t want to be too hard on this book, though—it’s not bad, and I’m not sorry I read it. But I am glad it wasn’t my first Vida novel, because on the basis of And Now You Can Go I may never have checked out her others.

Disclaimer: I read this novel a few months ago and it is entirely possible that nothing I’m saying about it is accurate. These are just the impressions that I came away with and that form the basis for my opinion.

[Hiba · Rating 2 out of 5]

"You can divide the world into two types of people, I decide, as I stand on the train, holding on to a steel pole. Those who would take their lives if they thought things were bad enough, and those who even if they were on the brink, like the man from the park, would see their error and turn back, sprinting fast and humming with relief."

I don't know what to make out of this novel, I assumed it was a debut novel, but it still didn't justify why I felt so perplexed reading it.
The events felt so detached, and I think the novel could've been better, a lot better if the author knew how to elaborate in the events in a way that they feel synced with the trauma-causing incident of the park. It felt extremely promising with that kickoff, but then settled into a boring unsettled rhythm, and I felt so disappointed because I expected so much more from it.

The story revolves around Ellis, a twenty-one-year-old student who while in the park one afternoon encounters a man who points a gun at her and tells her he wants to die, with her. She, fortunately, gets out of the incident physically unharmed but is left with a shaken personality, and we follow her as she drifts here and there, letting unsuitable partners swoon around her.
Then she leaves everything behind and goes in a volunteering mission to the Philippines with her mother. Back to the States, she is put face to face with her assaulter, but she skips on taking revenge.

The writing, similarly to the story is very disorienting and irritatingly so because we know that Ellis was the emotionally unstable girl seeking refuge in different areas and people, and the incident just adds to it. And that is how she ends up dumping everything and everyone and joining her friend in Ireland.

I don't know if I should give a chance to more books by Vendela Vida, because starting off with this one is not very promising.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this (I’ve loved all of Vida’s three most recent novels: We Run the Tides, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) but her first novel was such a disappointment.

It's even more disappointing that the novel opened with a fantastic scene which had me on the edge of my seat, but soon after that things didn't go the way I expected and the direct the narrative took felt like a bit of a damp squib, and was just pretty directionless and dull.

On the strength of her other novels I'll still give The Lovers a try, but I expected so much more from this novel and it really didn't deliver.

[Shani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love that Vida's writing reads like a conversation with a friend. That the extraordinary and the regular are interwoven. That sidetracks may mean nothing, or may come back as important details. The language is sparse, and the emotions are plain, there on the page, there for you to interpret for yourself.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like all of Vida's work, And Now You can ago forms a character study of a troubled woman. She executes both plot and characters incredibly well, and the sense of place which she creates is, as ever, vivid. Not my favourite of her novels, but one which I found incredibly immersive, and could barely turn my attention away from.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I ended this book with rather mixed feelings. I'll say up front that of course I didn't want to like it, or, specifically, I didn't want to like Vida's writing, because I hate her self-aggrandizing, egotistical, greasy-headed special snowflake douchebag of a husband, and therefore by close association she had to suck too.
But I'm not entirely convinced that she does suck. The book has it's faults -- it flouders in parts and doesn't flow; Vida leaves the narrator's age in key scenes vague, which is in turn confusing for understanding of the timeline; there's pockets of information missing that are not "fill-in-the-blanks-without-realizing-it" types, they're more the "WTF happened?" type, where you flip a page or two back to see if you've missed something, figured out that you hadn't, and felt disgruntled with the author for being careless.
Basically, there were parts of it that I kind of wanted to write up, workshop-style.
Also, believe-ability....not so much. I feel sorry for the narrator, but I very much lose interest in her situation, and I suspect that in real life, all the people we see circling around her in the novel (and somehow, they all seem to show up at exactly the prescribed and dramatically appropriate times...) would lose interest too. She was approached by a man in a park with a gun, then he left. The book is trying to be about the psychological after effects of that, but maybe it should have been shorter. Like a short story.

But: Vida does a good job of keeping things very immediate feeling, which I like. There's not hemming and hawwing in the narrative about what it all means. Some of the dialogue is clunky, but sometimes that also makes it more real, which was definitely needed.

[Wes · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something beguiling to me about all three of Vendela Vida's novels. I'm no longer all too young; I've never been female; nor have I had my life yanked out from under me in any irrevocable way. But I can identify quite clearly with searching for some form of transcendence and there's something at play in Vida's work, some hard to pin melancholy that is infused with a vague but comforting certainty. A guarantee of perseverance (or, shudder to think, redemption) which fully fleshes out her protagonists. Intelligent, emotionally rewarding fiction at its best.

[Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm drawn to VV's compact novels because she doesn't belabor or repeat herself, but moves the story right along. I wouldn't say they are extraordinary, just out-of-the-ordinary. There is something unique about her writing style, with its' conversational tone, subtle humor and poetry references that I really enjoy.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wry, sharp and beautifully observed.

[Vel Veeter]

This is the first novel by the writer/publisher Vendela Vida, who is also famous for being married to Dave Eggers. On some ways this is an interesting novel, and much of the writing is solid. But this might also be the most first novel to ever first novel (especially in the kind way of post-MFA fiction first novels tend to go).

This novel fails in a kind of spectacular way in my mind. So the bulk of the novel is a grad student in literature, who is feeling kind of mixed about her own talent, and her own confidence in taking the stipend to attend the university, is also dealing with the complications of being a 21 year old in grad school, of being on one’s own post college in which the various kinds of supports and structures that allows for are gone, of dealing with a new and probably fatally flawed relationship and still being too deeply affected by a long term relationship whose emotional and financial wages are still being paid. Like I said, it’s a first novel of a certain ilk.

But here’s where it stretches beyond belief. There’s a whole frame event which is listed as an “assault” on the cover of the book that shadows over the whole book. And this is not to say that the event is not an assault and that it would not be traumatic, but the assault that is described (not sexual by the way) is so particular and specific of an event and the protagonist tells us how big and important it is, but spends no time whatsoever unpacking the peculiar nature of it, that it feels completely boring and tacked on given how much we’re told it’s important to the book and how little it seems to be important to the book.

[Gretchen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went back and forth quite a few times on whether to give this novel three stars or four, and I decided on four because of this: in spite of the fact that I wasn't overly sympathetic to the main character throughout the novel, I still couldn't put it down. There was something about her reticence to share what she was going through emotionally that made me not relate to her as much, and in the end, I came to see this as a sort of brilliance in character development; not even the reader gets to know what she's going through because she can't articulate it and parse it in her own head. Intriguing characters throughout (though if you're like me you may want to hit the main character's roommate; that doesn't make her less intriguing though). This was my first Vida novel, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offbeat and creative. The story, about a woman who is psychologically stunned after being held up at gunpoint, sounds heavier than it is. Ellis' vulnerability after the shock turns her into a magnet for strange and mostly laughable responses from her friends, most of whom are really selfish acquaintances - esp. men who jockey to take advantage of her. Her numbness is a good foil for the comedy aspect but it's also tragic as you realize she has been numb all along. Her slight progress as she weaves together her past and the present gives the novel gravitas and some moments of beauty.

[rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was depressing, but really well-anchored in detail. It made me want to read V.V.'s book about sororities. Maybe I just liked it because I saw the author on the street once and she twinkled at me.

[Lara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vida is especially adept at portraying quirky, lonely characters. She captures the parts of life that no one is watching.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's odd who I tell and who I don't, but for the most part I don't tell anyone I know and I fantasize about telling strangers everything. I want to tell this Chinese-American woman with the son at the supermarket. I want to tell the person who takes my toll at the bridge. I want to drive in search of lifeguards and rangers and firemen, and tell them. I want to give the information, like a baby in a bundle on a doorstep, to people who will never know who I am. I can tell them and move on, drive off, and they will never hold it against me, never try to explain my future actions with what happened in the past. I do not want to be judged by this forever.

And Now You Can Go is a story told mostly in vignettes, detailing 21-year-old Ellis's journey as she recovers from a traumatic experience. She is held up at gunpoint in Riverside Park one December morning by a man who wants to die with someone beside him. Frantically, Ellis spouts off lines of poems in an attempt to distract him, and she is successful; the man runs off and Ellis is unharmed, but her life is severely affected following the event. She avoids her boyfriend Tom; she pulls in and then rejects various men who seem to be attracted to the idea of saving her; she is haunted by the scent of the man's gun inside her apartment; she changes her hair and freezes whenever she sees a man in a similar outfit to the one who held her up.

The men in Ellis's life revolve in and out like a carousel. Her father left her family for four years, reappearing one night on the couch as if nothing happened; although Ellis and her mother and sister seem to have recovered, her father has yet to apologize. Ellis's ex, Nick, holds their breakup over her head by threatening suicide. Tom seems stable but unable to understand the gravity of what Ellis has gone through, and she ducks and dodges his calls and visits. There is "the ROTC boy" and "the representative of the world," two acquaintances who reappear in her life to sleep outside her door and apologize on behalf of all men. None of these relationships fulfill Ellis: She is tired of having people define her through the lens of her trauma, but at the same time, she finds it difficult to relate to anyone and be intimate with them because they do not understand.

It is only through her relationships with her mother, sister, and best friend Sarah that Ellis seems able to recover. She takes a trip to the Philippines with her mother and her doctor co-workers to provide medical services to the impoverished residents there. Through a whirlwind of cataract surgeries and jitney trips, Ellis finds something else to place her focus on for the first time in months.

This was a bit of an odd book in that it felt very disjointed. The Philippines trip is a short section, yet feels like another novel entirely. Everything is told in short paragraphs detailing various, sometimes mundane, things — though I suppose it was a reflection of how Ellis's thinking becomes jerky and very specific in the aftermath of the holdup. Everything seems to come full circle in the end, with an endless cycle of stories to be told, each replacing the last.

It was an eerie, dark, sometimes slow read, but I was very intrigued in Ellis's world and her recovery and how she processed certain events that were happening.

[Ostap Bender · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a treat to find this little gem from Vendela Vida while perusing the shelves at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, even more so when I discovered she’d signed it. It was her first novel, written in 2003, and while it’s somewhat quiet in its plotting, there are so many little bits of humor and such a sharp eye for details that it was a pleasure to read.

The story concerns a young woman who is threatened at gunpoint in a park in the opening chapter, and while she survives, has a degree of trauma afterwards. It was a bit shocking to read in a 2015 interview with NPR afterwards that this was based on an identical incident which happened to her in that park when she was just 21 (and it shocked the interviewer too, who thought the concept was far-fetched).

I thought it was wise to not make the resulting trauma horrific or devastating, and not to overstate how it lingered in the woman’s life from then on, as she met with friends and lovers in New York, went home to family in San Francisco, and then went with her mother to do charitable work in the Philippines. It was the same kind of restraint I’ve seen in the three other books I’ve read from Vida so far. At the same time, through her deft writing, we do feel the effects of the act in so many subtle instances, as well as her observations about men and class, among other things.

The relationships she has with her friend, sister, and mother are all heartfelt and represented a nice bit of solidarity between women. There is a humanism here but it’s not starry-eyed or naïve. The book is somewhat episodic as it picks back up with her life, something which I thought might steer me to a slightly lower review score, but it finishes strong. This is an author who deserves to be better known.

Quotes:
On literature, this made me chuckle:
“’I’ve decided I should have lived back then,’ she says. ‘Do you know there’s no sex in Jane Austen? Everyone’s too busy looking for a man with property. That’s what I need to be doing.’
‘Maybe ‘man with property’ is a code for something,’ I say. And then I feel awful for bringing up anything sexual with her.”

On trauma:
“I tell the therapist what my Lifestyle condoms friend said about how I should never walk in the park.
’People like to think it can’t happen to them,’ she says. ‘They like to think there’s a reason it happened to you and not to them. They put it in a category that makes them think it’s far away. Next time just stop them and tell them that that response isn’t helpful to you.’”

[Lara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting premise, but it quickly goes downhill with the first section of the book consisting of crude descriptions of sexual encounters. The story improves as it explores more of Ellis's family history and her trip to the Philippines. While inspiring, the trip to the Philippines is poorly integrated with the rest of the story. Overall, there were so many characters and story lines that seemed forgotten about. Some reappeared unexpectedly, but never with any real closure. This book felt like a first draft that just didn't get there.

Also, the word choice at times was distractingly awkward. For example, in the Philippines, Ellis goes into the ocean until the water is "up to her uterus". Who writes, or talks, or thinks like this? Ellis's friend describes one of Ellis's boyfriends as a "prey-er". Again, who talks or writes like this? The term is predator!

Even the description on the dust jacket is confusing. It describes Ellis as "unrobbed and physically unharmed". I read this as un-robed. I had to go back and recheck this description after reading the book and finding out that Ellis wasn't made to strip naked.

I would not recommend spending time on this book when there are so many good books in the world.

[Susan Chow-Dukhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ellis, a young female grad student is accosted by a gun wielding man in a park near her apartment. The man wants to die, but doesn't want to die alone.
I had mixed feelings when I read this book. Vendela Vida has a smooth writing style, utilizing the right amount of description to keep the reader engaged in her story. Unfortunately I felt that the plot was disjointed, as the events in the three months following the event did not appear to reflect the impact of the gunpoint encounter.
Unless the intent was to show Ellis continuing her normal life, with the occasional thought about the gunman, the character was not shown in a sympathetic light, as she appears to tell people what happened in order to get their attention. When an ex-boyfriend doesn't react to her story about the gunman, she later tells him that she was hog-tied and raped.
The last part of the book ties in nicely with the first part, leaving half of the book not really adding to the story or character development. This book would have worked better as a novella.

[Edie Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very disappointed with this book. I’d read three others by the same author and absolutely loved them. Why this didn’t work for me?

For one, this was an early novel (I think Vida’s second). so allowances must be made. The major flaw was that it was basically all over the place. Bits and pieces interested me but as a whole it just didn’t work.

A man accosts Ellis, the offbeat protagonist, and holds a gun to her head. He threatens her life so he won’t be alone when he kills himself.

For the beginning of the book we get her reactions and those of the people in contact with her. But the plot drifts around. Several boyfriends make appearances, each with their own stories, and midway through there’s a trip to the Philippines with her mother to do medical aid work. We also learn about Ellis’s unusual family life. Other characters travel in and out, just there to add color. Too much was going on and I don’t think Vida successfully pulled it together.

I still intend on reading more of Vida’s books. Three winners out of four ain’t bad!

[ifonly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this novel does a good job of portraying what human life is like in a (seemingly) purposeful way: erratic and nonsensical. Yet we try to make sense of it anyway. The main character’s actions may seem odd, but, given the fact she almost died and got out of it by reciting poems, I can’t tell you what IS odd. I think making weird decisions is probably the natural outcome given the situation.

The story doesn’t really go anywhere necessarily, though I did enjoy just the day-to-day following the gun incident. The book comes to an actual climax, but this is short lived and only at the very end of the book.

I found this book compelling at parts, but with a (again, seemingly purposeful) lull that takes up a rather meaty portion of the middle. That section feels like it’s in the wrong book.

[m. neral · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had this book on my shelf for a while now- I picked it up in my college book store because I found the title and cover art to be interesting (art here is different from my copy), and while I wasn't disappointed with the book, there wasn't anything that would make me want to read it again, unless I experienced a trauma similar to the main one in the story, then it might be interesting to review. The best part was the author's writing style which flowed exceptionally well. I found the main character's thoughts/dialogue easy to follow and empathize with which made it a quick and interesting read.

[100procentSam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since this book is barely 200 pages long, it remains fairly superficial, but I'm not entirely sure I minded that. PTSD can be triggered by lots of things, so I was a bit weary when I started this book. I feel like it does a fairly decent job at showing what it's like to live with it, albeit on a superficial level. I was afraid this book would trigger me, but that was not the case, so I was very happy about that. Kinda disappointed by the ending I guess, since it's quite open and I'm not a big fan of that.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellis has been threatened by a man with a gun while walking in New York City, and although released unharmed she is unable to heal from the trauma. She struggles in her relationships, and a childhood experience that was never dealt with comes to the surface. This was a hard book to get through, but worth it as Ellis finds her deepest ties to her best friend in Ireland and her sister in England. Upbeat, life-affirming, hopeful ending.

[Brad Wilber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I related more easily to the middle section (San Francisco / Manila) where the heroine is set down among family and has a purpose. The bookending NYC sections, with more (understandable) lapses in the social contract, were disorienting but cohered just enough. I like how inventive VV is. I will have to do some thinking about whether I need to hang on to both this and "The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty" as the best examples of VV's work. This isn't going RIGHT to the Donate pile.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Vendela Vida's first book, and I'm sorry I read her other books first because they are much better. You can definitely tell she is going to be a good writer from this book but I had pretty high expectations that weren't met.

[Gail Kennon · Rating 2 out of 5]

starts with exciting event and rambles on from there. i found the prose very readable though became a bit of a slog towards the end and i found the main character and narrator fairly uninteresting as a person.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely my least favorite of hers -- I read this when it first came out and forgot everything about it, and then just read it again. Interesting in the context of having now sort of devoured all of her other novels in the past couple months.

[anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise was very interesting and the character's had dynamic relationships, but it just didn't didn't do it for me. Ellis was kind of flat and pitying. The book got lost in the message and it sacrificed the story.