Some of my favorite novels are about characters at loose ends. I think of Maria Wyeth in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, or the magnificently fucked-up family who drive Vanessa Veselka’s The Great Offshore Grounds. Such works are bleakly comic, or perhaps it’s more accurate to call them comically absurd. There is tragedy, and tribulation. But there is as well a sense of the universe as a dramatic engine, in which we are not at the mercy of the world so much as we are at the mercy of ourselves.
Rachel Khong’s first book, Goodbye, Vitamin, fits neatly into this category of fiction. Published in 2017, it is a coming-of-age novel of sorts, in which no one actually comes of age. Revolving around a character named Ruth, who has just turned 30, the narrative is deceptively ambitious: sharp and funny, terrific on the nuances, but with a bit of wildness in its heart. Ruth, after all, is at a loss as she moves into her fourth decade, with all the trepidation of someone who does not understand what she might want. In the aftermath of a nasty breakup, she returns to her parents’ home in Southern California, only to have her mother ask whether she’d be willing to stick around for a year to help with the care of her father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Here we see the turn that transforms Khong’s novel, the point at which Ruth must set her troubles aside, or try to, as she takes on the role of caretaker. That this has become a common circumstance remains too often unremarked. For Khong, the narrative is in the details, which emerge, as they must, from the stuff of daily life. Because of this, perhaps, Goodbye, Vitamin is written in a stripped-down diary format, epigrammatic, marked by striking observations and unexpected asides.
The point is that in caring for an elder, we confront—how could we not?—a slew of contradictions, not least that of looking after someone who once looked after us. There is the experience of time slowing, even as it seems to race. “What do I do all day?” Ruth asks herself. “I don’t even know.” The reflection will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s performed this sort of labor, which requires, by turns, the capacity to remain present and the ability to let go of time as it is generally understood.
What’s most astonishing about Goodbye, Vitamin is how it maintains its humor; Khong remains attuned to the incongruities, farcical or otherwise, her narrator must face. In an interview with R.O. Kwon, conducted not long after the publication of the novel, she explained the balance this way: “Trying out the different dosages of each was part of the interesting puzzle of putting this book together. In the things I most love to read, I want to laugh and I want my heart broken; I want to be frustrated then devastated, then entertained again. To me, sadness sharpens humor, and vice versa.”
It’s only natural, in other words, for pain and pleasure to go hand in hand.•
