Flights

Salinger in the making

By Mar-Vic Cagurangan

WHILE walking along Riverside Park in New York, a 21-year-old Columbia grad student encounters a gun-wielding depressed man wearing Giorgio Armani sunglasses. She escapes unscathed but the park incident gives her a psychological numbness.

This is the premise of Vendela Vida’s debut novel And Now You Can Go. Despite the banal plot, there is something sneakily gripping about this short novel. Ellis is stopped by the man in leather jacket, who forces her at gunpoint to sit and talk as he contemplates a murderous suicide.

He wants her to die with him. Ellis manages to talk the man out of his mad plan by reciting a Phillip Larkin poem. The man lets her go; Ellis leaves unharmed, and then goes through a battery of routines expected of a victim of violent crime. She reports to the police, seeks comfort from close friends, and unloads the psychological burden on a therapist, who doesn’t seem to like the way she dresses up.

The park incident becomes the talk of the town, drawing a stream of friends, acquaintances and strangers toward her. What follows is her struggle to connect with and to keep people at bay at the same time. She pushes Tom, her well-meaning but clingy boyfriend, away from her life, and soon starts getting involved in a string of fleeting romances with a bunch of characters, with whom she says she has “unspecified” feelings. She dates the unnamed ROTC recruit who shows her fake chivalric gestures and tells her stupid comments.

She gets involved with the nameless “representative of the world,” an enigmatic student, who, it turns out, is seeing another girl at the same time.

Her rich schizophrenic suicidal ex-boyfriend comes back into the picture to collect the rent money that she owes him. Frustrated, Ellis returns to her home in San Francisco and then accompanies her mother on a charitable trip to the Philippines, where, she witnesses a series of surreal vignettes. There she meets Philippine politicians who love the cockfight. She comes back home and reconciles with herself.

There is nothing extraordinary in the story other than the fact that it is not extraordinary. But the funny prose will engage you to keep turning the pages until the book is done.

JD Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye was the last book that I read in one sitting, until I got a hold Vida’s And Now You Can Go. Incidentally, the comparison doesn’t stop there. Vida’s Ellis is reminiscent of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, who drifts along a sea of people with silent sarcasm. Her obsession with human details is captivating.

The poignant voice strangely blends well with the narrator’s dry humor, which, is, well, really humorous. Vida doesn’t waste words. Every line matters to the whole story. And Now You Can Go, so delicious to read, promises to launch a monstrous literary career for this fresh blood.