Shortly after the death of her father, Clarissa Iverton, the doleful narrator of Vida's angular second novel, discovers that he was not, in fact, her father. Abruptly abandoned by her restless mother when she was 14, Clarissa abruptly abandons her doting fiancé, travels to the far northern reaches of Scandinavia--where her mother had lived as a young woman--and begins searching for her lost birth parents. The urgency of Clarissa's quest never quite snaps into focus, but this novel's evanescent beauty is contained in prose as cool and crystalline as the ice hotel where she spends a night.

B+

When New Yorker Clarissa Iverton happens upon her birth certificate, she realizes that everyone she trusts, including her freshly deceased dad, knows that her biological father was a man she's never met. Since her mother walked out years earlier, Clarissa, the protagonist of Vida's accomplished second novel, must go to Finland to find the stranger who fathered her.

Vida, who is married to Dave Eggers, propels Clarissa alone into the dark snowscape where her birth secrets are buried. She perfectly captures the emotional dimension of Clarissa's search, showing that the truth, no matter how pockmarked, is preferable to fiction.

This emotional core makes the book much more than an Edward Gorey comic strip. Take away the exotic setting and circumstance and you have a relentlessly believable story of a child’s futile struggle to, well, “be loved.” Enough children have to make their way through the world without nurture for this tale to strike a common chord, although Vida’s declared motives are a bit more abstract. In a brief afterword, she acknowledges “Against Narrativity,” an essay by Galen Strawson, as an inspiration for this novel; it made her “curious about the kind of person who would see their past as unconnected to their present.” Finally we understand that Clarissa’s mother is acting out a refusal to be a victim of her history. In the end, Clarissa does the same, almost — but, crucially, not quite — as ruthlessly. A Sami shaman who turns out not to be her father tells her of the northern lights, “We believe they are our ancestors.” Whatever sense Clarissa wins of her origins is just as brilliant, and as distant, as that.

Novels about unhappy young people who seek to escape their dysfunctional families and find a new identity are almost a genre to themselves, but the vivid scenes of Lapland, with its reindeer, northern lights, and Ice Hotel, give this novel a unique twist. There is even a whirlwind happy ending of a sort. Recommended for most libraries.

This is a sharp, sometimes brutal, portrait of a woman who feels her persona has been wiped away and wants to start over, not heal. Her careful, unadorned prose neatly reveals Clarissa's mix of damage and resolve, echoing Raymond Carver's minimalism while retaining the warmth that so many Carver imitators lack. And Vida's evocative descriptions of life in Lapland--the reindeer herds, the slow pace of the locals, a hotel made of snow and ice--underscore the themes of isolation and otherworldliness but never overwhelm the core story of Clarissa's despair.

A luminescent and evocative tale of grief, free of the standard cliches.