AND NOW YOU CAN GO
By Vendela Vida (Knopf, $19.95)
Yoshiko Han
Plot-packing Vida.
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On a bench in New York City's Riverside Park, a man wearing Armani sunglasses holds a gun to a Columbia grad student's head and tells her that he wants to die and doesn't feel like doing it alone. As a means of saving her lifeor simply as an act of desperationthe young woman, whose name is Ellis (after the island), begins quoting poetry: Larkin, Pound, Frost, and others to the tune of an old Liz Phair song. Miraculously, it works: Her recitations either scare the hell out of him or lull him into a weird submission, and he runs away.
In the months and pages that follow, Ellis does some running, too. She dodges and dumps her current boyfriend; hooks up with a couple of losers, including an ROTC meathead and a coke fiend; saves her fuckoff rich ex-boyfriend from a quasi-suicide; then travels home to the Bay Area to spend time with her splintered-but-temporarily-mended prototypically dysfunctional family. There, Ellis discovers her beloved little sister is being abused by a crank psychotherapist. Later, she even accompanies her surgical nurse mother to the Philippines to help perform cataract surgeries.
Whoa. A little too much plot you ask? Indeed, Go is packed with the stuff. Yet debut novelist Vendela Vida gives good language. (She shouldshe's married to Dave Eggers and co-edits The Believer with fellow it-lit girl Heidi Julavits.) Her style is like studied stream of consciousness, fast and elliptical but intelligent and efficient. And Vida makes Ellis an interesting, clever, yet ultimately aimless character, one I would've liked more had she been given the room to reflect on her near-death episode instead of being crowded out by extraneous characters. She's never finally capable of processing her picaresque experiences into any conclusions, any credos, any . . . anything.
Ultimately, Go goes nowhere. For its 198 pagesa length that feels at once tedious and entirely insufficientthe novel merely chronicles Ellis' reckless, aimless reeling. LAURA CASSIDY
Vendela Vida will read at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 11.
ORCHARD
By Larry Watson (Random House, $24.95)
This spare, beautifully detailed novel about an artist and the model who becomes his muse has as its compass points obsession, jealousy, reputation, and redemption. Those who remember Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" series in 1986, and the scandal it created, may find that those pictures give an extra dimension to Orchard, an almost 3-D effect. (The revelation of 240 portraits by the celebrated realist painter and art-dynasty paterfamilias of his Prussian-immigrant neighbor, many of them nudes and made in secret over 14 years, also came as a shock to Wyeth's wife.)
Taking off from these elements, Larry Watson (Montana 1948) subtly builds an intense portrait of two marriages and the struggle for possession by a well-known artist, Ned Weaver, and a farmer-husband, Henry House, of a woman: Henry's wife, Sonja, who eludes them both. Crucially, Watson has set Orchard in the 1950s, when a husband's "ownership" of his wife was taken for granted, particularly in a place like rural Door County, Wis.
Over the decades, Harriet Weaver has hung in through her husband's boundless womanizing for the rewards of his international reputation and her position as his critical eye. It's a thankless job: Ned is runty, prodigiously gifted, and mean as turpentine.
On her own since being shipped from Norway to the U.S. at 12, Sonja has had a decent-enough marriage and two children with Henry, an apple orchard grower, until a domestic tragedy seals the couple into separate miseries. Her air of "winter still" catches Ned's eye; intrigued, he hires her as a model and finds her a collaborator who's amazingly gifted yet crucially opaque. "Must one understand an enigma in order to portray it to others?" he broods.
Orchard isn't about lust in the studio (although there's plenty, it's unrequited) but about the power of seeingfor both the beholder and the beheld. Watson's own perception, rendered with fine, pure prose, is as evocative as Wyeth's eye, and he achieves shattering tension as his story hurtles inexorably toward tragedy. SHEILA BENSON
Larry Watson will read at Third Place Books (17171 Bothell Way N.E., 206-366-3333), 6 p.m. Sat., Sept. 13.
BEEMER
By Glenn Gaslin (Soho, $23)
Just how accelerated do you like your contemporary pop fiction? Consider this sequence in Beemer: Mere moments after terrorists obliterate a suburban Home Depot, protagonist Beemer Minutia's publicist girlfriend, Paul (not Paulettejust Paul), organizes an impromptu parking-lot benefit show with her band, Eunuch Town, as customers stagger by with melted faces and missing arms. If you paused to sigh and/or roll your eyes two times or more while reading that sentence, Beemer's minutiae are not for you.
Former fast-food flunky Glenn Gaslin is officially pledging the fraternity of J.G. Ballard and Chuck Palahniuk, and he's certainly earning his letters in meticulous, how-cool-stuff-works observationand familiar societal cynicism. His first novel is bursting with the tangential, theoretical, countercultural, fretful, postgrad West Coast angst and distrust that have inundated, oh, every story Douglas Coupland's ever written.
Beemer is a child of the road, a 25-year-old drifter who lives out of his Civic and aspires for nothing less than fame, fortune, and subversive capitalist domination via the most marketable product in his universe: himself (hence the ). Unsurprisingly, the blank variable in the "Beemer + ______ = fame and fortune" equation doesn't appear to yield a viable solution. So Beemer makes two pained compromises: (a) move in with similarly detached Paul at her folks' place in Orange County (where he rooms next to her mysterious, Trench Coat Mafia-esque little brother, dubbed Brandon Tartikoff); and (b) get his first real job in a subversive advertising think tankboth of which thrust the novel into surrealist overdrive.
