I once had a friend who measured his life in dogs. Winding down a long meal, he often said things like, I’m five dogs into a seven-dog life. He wasn’t alone. Recently, another friend, upon hearing of an elderly family member’s dachshund’s passing, replied with knowing despair: Oh, she said, poor thing, she’s on her last dog.
People measure time in all kinds of ways: children and trees. Houses or jobs. Some take a step back and call it history. Others move one closer and name it love. Time is our calendar, our walking stick, our call to prayer. None of us can escape it. We don’t just live in its embrace, so we have to mark it.
Each of us does this differently, even within a family—which can lead to comedy or heartbreak. Rachel Khong goes for both in her exquisite debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, one of the finest meditations on how families live among, make, and depend on memories, one word at a time.
The novel begins with a painful rupture: Howard, our narrator’s father and a college professor, has recently been diagnosed with dementia. Owing to some erratic behavior, he has been sent home on academic leave, and Annie, our narrator’s mother, has begun removing aluminum cookware—a possible source of the disease—from their kitchen.
Meanwhile, dumped by her fiancé, smarting with shame and a feeling of having failed to launch, Howard’s daughter, Ruth, has returned home for Christmas. “Now Mom is asking if I could stay awhile,” she writes, on December 29, “to keep an extra eye on things.”
“By things she means Dad, whose mind is not what it used to be.”
Goodbye, Vitamin is told by Ruth, diary-style, one day at a time, over the year she remains at home. Her tone is confessional, shocked, reality-clobbered. With one visit to the doctor, her family’s world has been shattered, and she narrates like someone for whom even familiar things are seen too brightly, too well. Arriving home, coming down off a five-hour energy drink, Ruth says: “My street smells cold and familiar. All the grapefruits are hanging from trees like ornaments. It feels like there’s a sun going down in my head.... On our street there is a squirrel that’s been hit, not freshly, and now looks like smashed cookies.”
She is not the only one with a diary, as it turns out. When not shut away in his office, Howard hauls out a diary he kept as a young father. In its pages, he recorded snippets of the accidental poetry Ruth created with her toddler questions. (“Today you asked me where metal comes from. You asked me what flavor are germs.”)
Wending around each other, Ruth and her father’s diaries form a kind of double helix of parenting and daughtering, of grief and wonder. Of love’s uneasy chronicle. It’s a structure so complex and powerful that it can invert roles. As the days progress deeper into winter, Ruth hatches a plan with her father’s graduate students to sneak her father back onto campus as if he were still a teacher; it’s less clear who is the parent and who is the child.
During his years as a professor, Howard taught California history, and now he does it again, only in stolen classrooms, all the lessons out of chronological order. The gold rush and the migration from Canton, China mixed together with the 16th-century Spanish romance novel that gave the state its name. Perhaps, this is how history comes to us after all—out of order, a puzzle in need of reassembly. Baked by the oven of fantasy.
Goodbye, Vitamin is one of the best portrayals of how family history can come to us this way, too. Slowly, we understand from Ruth that years ago she learned that Howard had an affair, and the effects have eroded the riverbank of Annie’s faith in him. Ruth has never faced these facts. It’s why, she finally admits, until now, she wouldn’t come home. “I wanted to preserve my memory of my perfect father,” she says. “I didn’t want to know the many ways he’d hurt my mother. I didn’t want to have to pick sides.”
Ruth has a brother, and he has chosen sides—their mother. For the first half of the book, Linus orbits the family like a satellite, observing the action as if squint-eyed from afar but never touching down. Ruth visits him in Santa Cruz, and he pries her for details but still won’t come home. For all his perspicacity, as his relationship to a flight attendant melts down, he’s totally oblivious to the ways he is living out his emotional inheritance.
Goodbye, Vitamin is a short book, but it manages to evoke a lifetime of a family’s shared experiences shard by shard. We watch as patterns repeat and ripple. Ruth has to be aware that she drinks the way her father did, and that ultimately the costs of this obliteration will come due, even if each hangover makes a new day feel new. Meantime, Linus’s refusal to address what has happened mirrors his mother’s deflections.
Although Howard is at the center of this book, Annie is not overshadowed by him. She emerges here as a potent, amusing, and strong character. Reencountering her mother as an adult, Ruth is bewildered and ashamed by her own behavior toward her. When Ruth thinks another affair is developing right beneath her mother’s nose, she leaps into action trying to thwart it, provoking her mother finally to say, “You have no right.”
If this were a play, there’d be a big shouting match at some point. But there are no big confrontations here because there can’t be—instead, Ruth must haul these incidents up from her own memory and reexamine them. Yet in the present, one morning Howard washes his shoelaces. One afternoon, he begs his daughter for no more crucified vegetables— trying to say, cruciferous. He weeps.
Given how many of us have been or will be caretakers of elderly parents, it’s shocking there aren’t more novels about the task. Goodbye, Vitamin is one of the all-time greats about this grim but glorious period of life. It’s all here, on the page, in Ruth’s one-year orbit of the sun: the rage and bursts of regret; the alcoholic relief, the grunginess of shit, the cosmic moon shots of clarity’s return, the endless force of the body’s terminal velocity. Tenderness passing like a comet.
Goodbye, Vitamin never batters you with its awareness, nor does it wallow in morbidity. Instead, it hones its sight on the strange loops of time, in which pitching in makes a child older, a parent younger. Ruth’s mother, relieved to some degree of her secrets and sometimes her housework, emerges flirtatious, young again in memories resurfaced.
These loops, and greater ones, recently took flight in Khong’s epic second novel, Real Americans, a novel that covers some 80 years in a Chinese American family’s life, across three generations, from a futuristic Bay Area back to Beijing during the Communist revolution, a story I know well because I wound up as its editor at Knopf over the past two years. It is an old-fashioned Great American Novel, one that asks new questions about time: who gets to treat it like a resource and who gets to view it like a wage.
I love the book. I haven’t read a novel that deals with the collision of entitlement and luck in American life quite like it. It feels like a sixth novel, not a second, for its confidence and craft, the depth of characterization, the way it dazzlingly reverses the order of a family saga, going from youngest to oldest and back again, like an accordion balanced neatly on a knee.
And still, I will always have a soft spot for Goodbye, Vitamin. Especially because I later learned this was not, as first novels often are, autofiction writing itself into a family story. Neither of Khong’s parents suffers from dementia. She simply imagined it. This is a tremendous feat. As the book deepens, its form of address changes to become even more intimate. The diary, written for no one, begins to address Howard. The past that has been so painfully dredged up is allowed to sink back into the gloomier depths. Following a doctor’s advice, Ruth and her mother—and Linus, too, eventually—decide to live more in the moment.
And so, rather than each diary entry beginning in a past tense, they start with “Today.” “Today you told me that the Santa Ana winds are sometimes called the ‘devil winds.’” “Today you and I sanded the patio.” “Today you asked about my job at the hospital.” And then, after Howard loses his temper and breaks every glass in the house, Ruth notes how their doctor informs them that “in a matter of days...it can go from being manageable to scary.”
The worse Howard gets, the more he sounds like Ruth as a child. “This morning,” she says, “Mom was making a sandwich and you said, Swiss cheese holes are called eyes. Your cheese watches you.”
There are times when the world feels like a river of horrors. There are times when the world unfolds like a river of wonders. Goodbye, Vitamin imagines how, under great pressure, and with the fiercest love, these rivers are not always separate. In fact, they pour into one another, mixing, forever mixing, until they pour out into a much wider sea.•
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.
