AND NOW YOU CAN GO

Ellis, the 21-year-old narrator of Vida's lean, absorbing first novel, is forced at gunpoint to sit and talk with a man in a New York City park as he contemplates a murder/suicide. Like Scheherazade, she reels off half-remembered poems to try to distract the man and keep herself alive. Though nothing more happens on that park bench, she carries on as if treading water in an emotional whirlpool, waiting to get sucked under. A grad student at Columbia, Ellis goes through the various routines expected of the victim of violent crime: reporting the event to the campus police, seeking succor from friends, going to a therapist. But the problem of how to define herself—as a victim or not—lingers and begins to seep into other parts of her life. She ricochets among a handful of men: Tom, her well-meaning but needy boyfriend; the nameless "representative of the world," an enigmatic grad student; a rich, suicidal ex; and her only potential savior, a colorful, if chauvinistic, ROTC recruit full of chivalric gestures and inappropriate comments. Frustrated, Ellis returns to her home in San Francisco and then accompanies her mother on a charitable trip to the Philippines, where, in a series of surreal vignettes, she assists doctors giving eye surgery to the poor. While a more conventional novel would use this trip as a denouement—a kind of reconciliation with her own privilege—here it merely underscores the narrator's dreamlike detachment. Despite the high drama of the start, this is an unsentimental tale, in which the classic brush with death elicits a sense of awe as well as anger, and conventional notions of therapy and reconciliation are overturned. The end, unfortunately, arrives just as the book began—abruptly—and the reader longs for something more. Nevertheless, this remains an intriguing and auspicious debut. Agent, Mary Evans. (Aug.)

Forecast:Vida, the author of the nonfiction work Girls on the Verge, is also a co-editor of the magazine the Believer (and was married earlier this year to Dave Eggers). Like her Believer co-editor Heidi Julavits, whose own first novel (Forecasts, June 23) was published earlier this summer, she will attract considerable mainstream and alternative media attention. Eleven-city author tour.