And Now You Can Go, the debut novel by Vendela Vida, the literary world’s new favorite darling, has caused quite the buzz. Vida is an example of the refreshing set of emerging young writers who are more interested in the art of writing than the accompanying fame. Along with writing fiction, Vida is co-editor of The Believer, a new avant-garde literary magazine, and also co-founder of a tutoring program in San Francisco that helps childrend with their writing. The Muse recently spoke with Vida about her current projects.
The book begins with a very intense scene and ends leaving the reader wanting more. Why did you choose to start and end the novel so abruptly?
I like to read a lot of plays. I wanted to start it like a play in that the action starts right away. You don’t have 30 pages of character development before something happens to the character. And that why action takes place in the first sentence. In [James Joyce’s] The Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, at the end it’s very clear to the reader that this is just a chapter of this person’s life and that there will be more chapters. So I very consciously ended [my book] with a trip, in an echo of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Was this novel autobiographical?
As a writer, you can’t write about things that you’ve never heard about or never had your friends tell you about or never thought about. So in some ways I think that the most autobiographical thing about the novel is the sense of humor. I definitely share that in common with the narrator. But everything else is basically things that I’ve heard about or that I’ve experienced in some minor way that I embellished upon or things that have happened to friends and it all ended up in my head…and it just came out.
Many reviews have characterized the book and your writing style as ‘sparse.’ Would you agree with that observation?
Yes, very much so. I don’t read many reviews but I would agree with that because I sculpted it down a lot. Every time there’s a page break I probably deleted a paragraph because I felt it wasn’t necessary. I also wanted it to be very fast. And the main character had just been held up at gunpoint. I didn’t think it would be very true to her to have sentences that were long, descriptive and meandering, even though I love sentences like that. But I felt in this situation that is should be quick and staccato because she’s adrenaline-infused and everything’s happening very fast and there is not a lot of room for reflection.
How would you describe your book?
Fast. Yeah … I could say fast.