Volume 50, Number 20 · December 18, 2003
The Difficult Part
By Cathleen Schine
And Now You Can Go
by Vendela Vida
Knopf, 190 pp., $19.95
And Now You Can Go, Vendela Vida's first novel, begins with a poem. Ellis, a twenty-one-year-old graduate student at Columbia, is stopped by a man in Riverside Park who puts a gun to her head. He wants to die, he says, but he doesn't want to die alone. Ellis notices that the gun smells of garlic. She notices that the man ties his shoes with double bows. She begins to recite poetry 'like a cheerleader gone haywire.' She tries Ezra Pound, discards Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan' (no rape poems!) and Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' (no death poems!), sings the William Carlos Williams poem about plums to the tune of a Liz Phair song, then ends up with the first stanza of Philip Larkin's 'Love':
Review, 1663 words
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