We begin Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, the December California Book Club selection, in the same state of disorientation as the narrator. The opening date, which grounds us concretely in time, contrasts sharply with the strangeness of the scene with which we’re presented—the inconsistent actions of a man losing hold of shared reality. This discrepancy between how things should be (holiday decorations, expected festivity and cheer) and how things unmistakably are (pants hung among Christmas lights, distrust, and unease) establishes the central concern of the novel: the story of a father and his adult daughter confronting the fundamental mystery of each other.
Khong’s debut novel recounts the story of Ruth, a 30-year-old woman who, reeling from her recent breakup, returns from San Francisco to her childhood home in suburban Upland to assist her mother with the care of her mentally deteriorating father, Howard. But as she progresses through the yearlong commitment in proximity to her father, her own experience of time begins to mirror his: The two of them are both governed by details of the past. With the blurring of temporality that follows, Goodbye, Vitamin reckons with not only the elusive nature of memory but our understanding of who our parents were before we existed.
Khong evinces the tension of a family’s unknowability by using an unusual narrative structure: short, diary-like fragments, stamped by the dates of the unfolding year, in which the narrator takes note of details and scenes. This form not only resembles Howard’s selective memory but also illustrates the gaps inherent in our understanding of the people we come from. Woven throughout the novel are letters Howard has written to his daughter during her childhood: a record of her little mannerisms he couldn’t bear to forget. What permeates these endearing, fleeting details is Howard’s awe at the mystery of this little person he has brought into the world: “Today was your birthday, and when it was time for you to blow out the candles, you wouldn’t. Time was running out and you were anxious about it.” What’s particularly heartbreaking about this notebook of letters is its implicit anticipation of lost memory; Ruth’s poignant narration picks up this project by pointing out details and letting them linger. “Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments,” Ruth recounts. The inaccessibility of the inner lives and past lives of our loved ones shines through the way both Ruth and her father marvel at each other throughout the text, both attempting to piece together versions of each other that they no longer resonate with.
Seven years later, Khong has moved in a more conventional direction with her second novel, a family saga published this year. Nearly doubled in length and scope, Real Americans follows a traditional narrative structure, distinct from Khong’s ruminative, diaristic debut. While the recent, heftier book—spanning more than 60 years of family history—permits a more explicit presentation of plot, Goodbye, Vitamin allows the story to speak for itself. Details are isolated by the narrator’s attention, and she doesn’t set forth interpretations of scenes, coming closer in style to Jenny Offill’s work as if it were joined with the comedic quality of Raven Leilani’s Luster. Between these two formally disparate novels, what remains consistent is Khong’s uncomplicated and effective prose, the ease of her intelligence, and her manipulation of voice, which, in the case of Goodbye, Vitamin, remains delightfully sardonic and self-referential against a melancholy undercurrent. Despite the differences between Khong’s two texts, her preoccupation stays the same: that memory and its inaccuracies cannot only turn our loved ones and kin into strangers but can render us strangers to ourselves.
Both of Khong’s books explore the inscrutability of our parents; both books, for instance, feature a parent with a locked office door. Khong doubles down on the curiosity that this engenders in Real Americans. Fascination with the secrets of their parents’ pasts is central to each of the three narrative perspectives and drives the novel. But in Goodbye, Vitamin, the erosion of Howard’s memory inverts this tension, with the adult daughter in the unsettling position of withholding knowledge from her father. While she’s more rooted in his present reality than he is, with a firmer grasp on where and who he is, this shift in power dynamics leaves Ruth to confront his selfhood outside his role as her father. “Okay, but listen,” she confesses halfway through the novel, “this is why I so seldom visited…. I wanted to preserve my memory of my perfect father. I didn’t want to know the many ways he’d hurt my mother.” The wider lens of Real Americans further complicates this blind spot by exploring what happens when a child grows into a parent; what frustrates Lily, one of the protagonists in Real Americans, about her mother—her restraint, her dishonesty—she finds herself repeating with her son, which ultimately affords her the compassion toward her mother that the vulnerability of her father’s dementia affords Goodbye, Vitamin’s Ruth.
At the end of Goodbye, Vitamin, an already nontraditional narrative shape further disintegrates, turning into a kind of prose poem in which dates are replaced by vignettes, present moments follow one another, and the narration slides into second person. The effect on the page is one of continually starting over, an experience not unlike the father’s as he untethers from memory. The impact aligns with the novel’s title; like a vitamin, each moment in the book is highly distilled. Ruth extends this insight to her father in a mutual gesture of intimacy: “Today, buying refills of vitamins, I bought two of each type, so from now on, I can take them with you.” This conclusion shows a touching evolution, as the narrator abandons her project of challenging what she can’t know (and what her father can’t remember) and resigns to living fully in the present: a present that, as her father’s letters epitomize, is the ultimate form of love. Here, Khong’s understated brilliance shines: “And: be present, and the words falling behind me, quickly, into the past, too.”•
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.
“HELLO, WATER”
Read author Sarah Stone’s essay about Goodbye, Vitamin, which she describes as “a meditation for remembering.” —Alta
WHITE SPACE
Read writer Angie Sijun Lou’s personal essay about rethinking fragments and her own journal after reading Khong’s debut. —Alta
“SUFFUSED WITH MAGIC”
CBC selection panelist and journalist Lynell George interviews Nisi Shawl about The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox, which follows real-life figure Alene Lee, a Black and Native American writer whom Jack Kerouac wrote about in a novella. —Alta
DECEMBER READS
Here are 10 new books about or of the West that we’re looking forward to reading. —Alta
“MISSION IN THE REAL”
Read novelist Hari Kunzru’s speech in acceptance of the 2024 Chowdhury Prize in Literature, which makes a case for writing fiction, “one of the best cultural modes we have to understand the complexities of our world.” —Air/Light
PROFOUND IMPACT
Prior CBC author Tommy Orange visited high school students in the Bronx, where they discussed his acclaimed There There. Pass rates for students at that school taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled since the novel became a mainstay. —New York Times
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