It doesn’t exactly seem like a recipe for a darkly comic yet heartfelt novel, but that’s exactly what Goodbye, Vitamin is. Told in a diary format over the year that Ruth spends at home, Goodbye, Vitamin is a quietly brilliant disquisition on family, relationships and adulthood, told in prose that is so startling in its spare beauty that I found myself thinking about Khong’s turns of phrase for days after I’d finished reading ... It’s refreshing to read female authors — among them, Jami Attenberg, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Marcy Dermansky — who are subverting the longstanding convention of adult men who feel stuck, who are emotionally unavailable, who find adulthood just out of reach, and who are often 'saved' by a woman who has her life together. They, and now Khong, are showing that women can be screw-ups too.
Rachel Khong has managed to create an Alzheimer’s novel that is heartbreaking but also funny, offering a fresh take on the disease and possible outcomes both for the person suffering from it and their caretakers ... But the real charm of the novel isn’t the plot so much as the sparkling little details that pop up on every page, illuminating the dark material ... This isn’t melodrama; it’s a novel modeled on real life, where humor often rubs shoulders with pathos, and Ruth’s gift as a narrator is her ability to observe and record it all ... Goodbye, Vitamin never minimizes the difficulty of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s. But it also shows how this care can be rewarding.
...this is a writer who clearly knows how to squeeze the sweetness out of the tart fruit life throws at you ... Khong's endearingly quirky novel, which takes the form of Ruth's diary of her transitional year, is filled with whimsical observations, oddball facts, and yes, even some romanc ... Sweet? Yes. Sugarcoated? Perhaps. Saccharine or cloying? Not to me. Hello, Rachel Khong. Kudos for this delectable take on familial devotion and dementia.
It’s material for another grueling exploration of loss, and yet, against all odds, Ms. Khong has produced a book that’s whimsical and funny. This is because the author, like her guiding spirit, Lorrie Moore, has a love for the ridiculous in the mundane ... Amid the fear and heartache there’s plenty of absurdity, too, in her father’s erratic behavior, though Ms. Khong never descends to mockery. In the main storyline, the professor’s former students invent a fake class for him to teach, to boost his morale. But the charade doesn’t last long. Mostly this sweet-natured novel is about Ruth’s attempts to come to terms with a past her father can no longer remember while still attending to the quirky, fleeting joys of the present.
The register alternates swiftly between quirky and pathos, and a kind of joyous gallows humour ... Reading the novel is a reminder, too, of how well American writers portray small-town life and culture — the boredom, the restlessness, the reluctant homecoming ... The formal sweetness of these attempts to hold back the dread to come is like a chain of fairy lights in the darkness, with Khong displaying a deep understanding of the way in which memory humanises and connects us individually, communally — and without which all becomes chaos.
...a story in which desires and projections bump up uncomfortably and often comically close with the truth ... If some of the details in Goodbye, Vitamin are slightly off perhaps this is because the entire book, and not just the passages about Ruth’s father, are tinged with a kind of playful absurdity that places it just perceptibly shy of realism ...the characters, as well as the novel itself, have become infused with a kind of Alzheimer’s logic ... The universe that Khong sets forth for us is a snow globe that she can shake any time she wants in order to evade any kind of real cogency or weight ...while the memory loss in Goodbye, Vitamin is a vehicle for humor and play, it ultimately is also a means of expressing absolute tenderhearted emotion.
All of this—the deception, the sickness, the loss—can get heavy. Though the book is remarkably funny, Khong’s always willing to head into the storm. Her moral radar is excellent, and instead of drawing humor from her characters’ pain, she mines it from the richness of their relationships. Khong also displays an exceptional talent for evoking a lifetime of ups and downs between two people in meaningful ways ... Khong attempts to capture Ruth’s mother’s anxiety over her husband’s infidelity and her children’s confusion as to why she didn’t leave him. It’s fascinating drama for the reader, but it whittles Ruth’s mother down in the process ... Goodbye, Vitamin is an excellent summer read, delivering both humor and emotional weight. Khong will deservedly be the summer’s breakout literary star.
...[a] slim, wistful book; it’s the sort that’ll break your heart but leave you smiling ... Khong, writing in wry episodic chunks, somehow makes this story never sentimental, rarely sad and ever-surprising: Ruth, a naturally funny narrator, immediately becomes a friend. And while a story about a parent whose mind is dimming can’t possibly have a happy ending, Khong pulls off something nearly as good, leaving her characters surrounded by warm Christmas lights and glowing with something else. Ruth doesn’t name it, but it’s love.
This is a novel of millennials, for millennials, and by a millennial, so naturally there are no chapters, but rather brief, diary-like entries … Despite the abbreviated passages, the gee-whiz observations of the too-old-to-be-precocious narrator, and the meandering nature of the narrative, the book deals with serious life themes in an engaging way. Ruth has an eye for the awkward social moment and is quick with the wry quip, making even the most self-involved musings (and there are a lot of them — Ruth seems to have no interests beyond herself) palatable … The entire narrative is imbued with a sitcom gloss that ultimately numbs the reader to the emotional crises that Ruth faces. By the end, we’re ready to say goodbye to Ruth.
The mechanics and metaphysics of recollection are also an obsessive preoccupation for Ruth, the narrator of Khong’s wonderful first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin ...a novel about the struggle to keep track of oneself in the face of loss — in Didion-speak, about someone who is attempting to get back on nodding terms with the person she used to be ... Wry, warmhearted, and wise, Khong’s writing can turn mid-sentence from really funny to really sad, and often back again ... Khong’s novel will stay with you long after you turn the last page.
A slim but powerful volume, Goodbye, Vitamin is written in journal-like dispatches as Ruth watches her father, Howard, slide down the tunnel of Alzheimer’s disease ... As Ruth comes to grips with the messy reality of her family, she strengthens her ties with her long-suffering mom and younger brother ...a funny and beautiful meditation on family bonds and finding one’s place in an ever-changing world.
...it shows in her [Khong's] fiction, which is compassionate, thoughtful and observant –– pretty much the opposite of self-centered ... Throughout, Goodbye, Vitamin explores the contrast between the acute heartache of a romantic relationship’s end and the chronic heartache of losing a loved one to dementia ...interspersed with these small moments of joy, often when Ruth recognizes some moment of shared humanity with acquaintances or strangers, or as she allows herself to view her father and her family as simultaneously imperfect and indescribably precious.
Khong whisks up a heartfelt family dramedy in a debut novel that ruminates on love, loss, and memory ... Ruth’s vivid narration reads much like an intimate diary ... Ruth and Howard are a hilarious father-daughter duo, at turns destructive and endearing, and entries from a notebook that Howard kept during Ruth’s childhood serve as an enriching back story to their deep bond. Khong’s pithy observations and cynical humor round out a moving story that sparks empathy where you’d least expect it.
Because of the book’s truncated structure and the frequent descriptions of minutiae (catalogs of Ruth’s boyfriends postbreakup, patrons at the bar where she and Theo go on a date, facts about Alzheimer’s disease), passages seem underdeveloped, especially given the weighty subject matter. Though this foray into a family’s attempts to cope mostly skims the surface, it does gain depth as it progresses.
