And Now You Can Go
By Vendela Vida
Knopf, 190 pages, $19.95
The Unprofessionals
By Julie Hecht
Random House, 228 pages, $23.95
Reviewing two or more works in one essay poses a challenge for a critic, who may find herself having to abridge her assessments and draw parallels between books that, at first glance, seem to have none. Fiction writers like Julie Hecht, who developed a cult following with her 1998 debut story collection–“Do the Windows Open?”–and newcomer Vendela Vida make it even trickier with their respective first novels, both sharply if eccentrically observed, idiosyncratic narratives that would seem to resemble each other not at all.
Yet at their very core is a startling, substantive similarity, though it appears in each novel to different effect. Both feature a female protagonist haunted by a missing father and moved to muse on this loss by a young man who will unexpectedly come into each of their lives and cast an indelible impression on them. In Vida’s bewitching novel, “And Now You Can Go,” the father’s absence is temporary, but the catalytic encounter with a stranger is harrowing and potentially violent. A young heroin addict becomes the best friend to the narrator in “The Unprofessionals,” a dysfunctional, middle-age artist grappling with the recent death of her father. These two lost souls amble through life, trying to muster the stamina and maintain enough optimism to have faith that they’ll return to themselves in one form or another.
Vida introduces Ellis, a skittish 21-year-old woman from San Francisco who has recently relocated to New York City to pursue an art history doctorate at Columbia University. During a mid-afternoon stroll through Riverside Park, Ellis is held up at gunpoint by a bespectacled white man in a black leather jacket. He wants from her neither money nor sex, but companionship in misery and death. ” `I feel calm next to you. . . I feel calm enough to finally die. For us to die together,’ ” the man tells her. Desperate to find an out, Ellis determines that the best way to get the gun away from her temple is to lure him to a nearby bookstore and remind him of the good things in life: art and poetry. In a scene that is as frightening as it is mordantly funny, she tells him about woodcuts and frescoes, and recites to him every poem she can remember, by Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams. ” `There are things to live for,’ ” Ellis pleads, ” `Philip Larkin.’ ” Despite his not knowing who or what ” `a Philips Larkins’ ” is, the gunman starts to falter, and ultimately he lets her go, apologizing profusely before fleeing.
Although she escapes without physical injury, Ellis is far from unscathed. Within 24 hours, she is forced to contend with a whole new network of people, among them police officers, school security personnel, a therapist and victim-fetishists. No one–not even her friends or her boyfriend, Tom–seems to say or do the right thing, not that Ellis has a sense of what it is that she needs from people. Shock has given way to numbness, though Ellis is clear about what she does not want: an alarmist therapist who questions her virtue, a friend’s admonishments for walking alone in the park, a graduate student who collects survivors real and imagined, police who make her peruse endless mugshots of African-American and Latino men after she has repeatedly told them the perpetrator is Caucasian, and a boyfriend who wonders aloud ” `how long it will take you to get over this’ ” the morning after the incident.
Ellis’ support system–best friend Sarah, younger sister Freddie and loyal if emotionally reserved mother–are all miles away, in the United Kingdom and California. Without them she feels unmoored and lonely. As a result, she allows herself to be attended to by a variety of opportunistic male acquaintances, like the red-faced guy she dubs “the representative of the world,” who romantically preys on women in crisis; and the burly ROTC undergrad eager to track down the gunman and enact his brutal brand of vigilantism.
“It’s all nonspecific, this affection, this longing,” Ellis explains. The lack of intimacy provides a comfort, as well as the mental space for her to make sense of the incident and its aftermath. “I fantasize about telling strangers everything. . . . 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 do not want to be judged by this forever.”
When her mom, a surgical nurse, invites her to come on a goodwill optometric mission to the Philippines where she’ll be helping to perform free cataract surgery, Ellis gains the distance and, yes, clear-sightedness, to get some perspective. This is not to say that Ellis has some predictable, grand epiphany–Vida proves too intuitive and accomplished a writer to make such a misstep. Ellis’ realization is gradual. She eventually discovers she yearns for closure, and that she’ll get it, or believes she can get it, through forgiveness. Throughout “And Now You Can Go,” Ellis learns what it means to have forgiveness withheld: She watches as her doorman Danny grieves for his wife and kids, who left him because he wouldn’t quit drinking. She endures the wrath of her ex-boyfriend Nicholas, a deeply troubled scion harboring an obsessively sadistic grudge because she ended their relationship, despite innumerable attempts to tie up loose ends.
Can Ellis accept the apology of a man who has held a gun to her head? He said he was sorry as he ran from her, and he might have written the scrawled “I’m sorry” that appears on one of the “Wanted” signs posted on the Columbia campus. The question becomes inextricably linked in Ellis’ mind with her father’s four-year desertion of her family, the memories of which are immediately conjured during the assault in the park. This is the great mystery of Ellis’ adult life, and Vida demonstrates tremendous patience, sensitivity and droll humor as she charts the path traveled by her memorably odd hero, from paralytic bewilderment to a credible level of self-discovery and resolution. “I know sorry men when I see them,” Ellis says. “I’ve seen the change in a sorry man’s face–the embarrassment, the grief–and I know how to recognize it in others.”
The Long Island-based photographer who is the unnamed 49-year-old protagonist of “The Unprofessionals” and who first appeared in Hecht’s “Do the Windows Open?” puts herself forth as a woman living “without a soul.” As such, she drifts through stores looking for linen shirts and loading up on sacks of Xanax and chocolate. She remains relatively obtuse about the source of her existential crisis, but it slowly emerges that she is bereft of her father and racked by guilt for allowing him to fall “into the hands of the medical system” and be “tortured to death by doctors in hospitals. My unwitting complicity in this, along with that of my siblings, had left me wandering between discount drugstores and all-night supermarkets for the rest of my life so far.”
There are few people to whom she can turn for solace. She feels “separate from everyone and everything in the world.” Her friends, she complains, are “a group of narcissists or anxiety-depressives. The narcissists were too narcissistic to care about anyone else and the anxious ones were too anxious to think about anyone but themselves.” Her husband would seem alternately bemused and exasperated by her. ” `You knew when you married me that I didn’t talk,’ ” he tells her.
The one person available to her is a 21-year-old privileged misfit she met 10 years earlier through his parents, world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto and his wife. “The boy,” as she calls him, is an elitist Republican with a penchant for Mel Torme and crisply ironed oxford shirts and khakis who lives in Pasadena, Calif., and is a gofer for a company that remakes horror movies. He is also a heroin addict, a fact he vehemently denies, even as his parents repeatedly drag him into rehab. She claims this boy as her best friend:
“Whenever he called me, I’d drop everything to talk to him. Not in a social-worker mode, but as a lucky audience for anything he had to say.”
This heady novel is, in effect, her remembrances of a friendship limited by their primary medium of communication: the phone. Often, she is at the mercy of his whim: He calls her at weird hours and can rarely talk when she phones him. When their lines connect, so, too, do their sardonic, often-disheartened perceptions of the world. They share a mutual disdain of contemporary Hollywood (though she uses TV shows as her main points of reference to better understand him, “The Larry Sanders Show” to envision the corporate atmosphere, and A&E Hollywood biographies of actors in various states of recovery to understand his struggle with heroin addiction). The two swap humiliating-job stories, he in his present position at Creative Monsters, she as an erstwhile gallery assistant made to clean the white walls with a small pencil eraser. And they delve into the subjects of psychopharmacology (they both hate Ambien and are fond of recommending their various prescriptions to one another: Xanax, Neurontin, Clonidine) and psychotherapists, whom she ultimately dismisses as being among “the crew of the unprofessionals.”
The boy provides the woman occasional comfort by offering a listening ear, but their temperamental differences become ever more apparent as time goes on. He is determinedly cynical, and though she is older and presumably more experienced in the realm of despair, she remains hopeful. She is a fan of Elvis Presley’s, old movies and books on holistic medicine (she is especially keen on Dr. Andrew Weil), and tries in vain to influence the boy’s bleak outlook on the nature of existence, which he believes is meaningless. She sends him the book “A Mother’s Kisses,” repeatedly nudging him to read it, and reminds him of life’s virtues much in the way that Vida’s Ellis attempts to rouse a life-affirming spirit in her gunman (though Ellis has to do so to save herself). ” `Work, love, nature, books, poems, music, traveling, trees, birds, butterflies, flowers,’ ” proclaims Hecht’s protagonist, before she realizes to herself that it “sounded like something said by a follower of Norman Vincent Peale.”
The woman’s quirkily maternal campaign is impeded as the boy becomes increasingly alienated and morose. He calls her less and less, and returns none of the messages she leaves on his cell-phone voice mail. Her worries for him exacerbate her anxieties at large, and yet she finds herself ill-prepared for the fate that awaits her young friend. It’s a necessary catharsis, however, one that will allow her to slowly awaken from her vertical coma and prove she still has a soul, if not to her then certainly to the reader.
All along the woman wants to, perhaps needs to, believe in the mythic person the boy portrayed on the phone–a misunderstood son of overly suspicious parents, among other things–and she has projected her own fantasies onto him as well. Because we see him through the woman’s eyes, he never seems entirely credible, even as the boy’s father reveals to her the bitter truth of his miserable life. He comes off as a caricature of morbidity, the fact of his drug addiction a gimmicky afterthought. Just as the protagonist depends on and is ultimately heartbroken by the boy, so, too, is “The Unprofessionals” reliant on the conceit of their friendship and his addiction, and the end result is no less disappointing.
Hecht is a master at black humor with a profound understanding of the most complicated regions of the soul, and her photographer protagonist is by far one of the more unusual and endearingly neurotic heroes to appear in recent American letters. If only she’d had a real friend–by which I mean a fully realized one–then this could have been another extraordinary vehicle for her ruminative adventures.
