Late in Rachel Khong’s wry, moving, and highly relatable first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, told by a daughter whose father’s oncoming dementia forms the ground and framework of the story, the father holds a glass up to the light, saying, “Hello, water,” and, shaking the dubiously useful vitamins and supplements he’s about to swallow, “Goodbye, vitamin.” It’s a painful subject, the attempt to look after an aging parent who doesn’t want help, and Khong uses humor—mostly offbeat and subtle, only occasionally slapstick—both to show how the family copes and to lighten the book for the reader.
The narrator-protagonist, Ruth, is a young woman who has been living in San Francisco, avoiding her family. The novel is her diary, which turns into a letter to her father. It’s full of snippets of everyday life along with memories, little facts and lists of TV shows or internet oddities, and quotes from the daybook her father kept as a letter to her, recounting childish observations and witticisms. Finally, she adds entries from the record she begins keeping of his own words.
After being dumped by her fiancé, she heads home to Southern California for the holidays for the first time in “three or four” Christmases. Her mother asks her to stay to help, and Ruth moves in as her brother, Linus, who has been on duty for years, slips away, leaving Ruth to take her turn. Her father often hides angrily in his office, and Ruth watches TV, reads old papers, and shoves delicacies like folded tortillas filled with jam under the door.
Soon, she begins conspiring with Theo, her father’s gentle teaching assistant, and her father’s former students to create a fake class and pretend he hasn’t been fired (put on indefinite leave) from his job as a history professor. The students have had to evade an unsympathetic dean by holding classes in a variety of rooms and then off campus in places that seem to fit the subject matter of the course. In an aqueduct. On horseback. Any given paragraph might be a mixture of juxtaposed tones, from the deadpan presentation of heartbreaking caretaking details to the characters’ wisecracking.
For much of the book, Ruth veers back and forth between earnestly cooking cruciferous vegetables to try to save her father’s memory and denying the new reality, even as he repeats an entire lecture, loses words, and announces that he doesn’t remember anything about the piece of cake he’s just eaten except that it was delicious. But after all, doesn’t everyone forget things sometimes? Ruth’s collage of a diary shows her struggling with the ordinariness of forgetting, repeating, and losing words and memories. The chaos seems almost contagious: At one point, she means to return a book to the library but drops it into the mailbox. When she goes on a date with Theo, even a waiter “struggle[s] to remember the pie list.” Her mother refers to her father’s condition as lapses in memory, and they have no definite proof that it’s anything else:
There is, presently, no single test or scan that can diagnose dementia with complete accuracy. It’s only after the person is dead that you can cut his or her brain open and look for telltale plaques and tangles. For now, it’s process of elimination. What we have are tests that rule out other possible causes of memory loss. In diagnosing Alzheimer’s, doctors can only tell you everything that it isn’t.
What my father doesn’t have: hyperthyroidism, a kidney or liver disorder, an infection, a nutritional deficiency. Deficiencies of vitamin B-12 and folic acid can cause memory loss and are treatable.
“I’m just straight-up demented,” Dad says.
We see where Ruth gets her humor. Her father’s wit makes him part of the family defense against the impending darkness rather than the object of the joke. And he helps them come up with ideas for his future, including a set of nonfunctional doorknobs to disguise the real ones below.
As the whole family begins to face reality, the book becomes a meditation on remembering, on forgetting, and on what we choose to hold on to. Linus rejoins the family, and Ruth tells him how scientists have learned to give mice false memories and déjà vu: “Which—whatever, is my feeling. Why don’t they figure out how to keep mice from forgetting things? We don’t need more memories. It’s hard enough trying to get a handle on the ones we’ve got.”
Ruth must let go of her idea that her father was perfect, coming to understand how his drinking and unfaithfulness have hurt her mother and the family. As Ruth, her mother, her father, Linus, and Theo wrestle with all of this, the family becomes closer than they’ve ever been. The humor tips toward sadness but also provides the satisfaction of watching them help one another go through this change, one bowling alley trip or trickster set of false doorknobs at a time.•
Join us on December 12 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Khong will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Mimi Lok to discuss Goodbye, Vitamin. Please note that this event is on the second Thursday of the month. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
