Such a lithe, unassuming novel, Vendela Vida’s latest! In this study of fragility and resilience, lives and identities are revealed to be as precarious as houses of cards. The plot recollects that of Vida’s previous book, The Lovers, in that it, too, presents an American heroine looking for solace in the East in the aftermath of a crushing personal disaster. But The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is a much subtler and more agile creature. It begins in a realist mode but sheds this skin as it goes, becoming in its second half a gently postmodern, surrealist philosophical novel on the protean nature of personal identity. That it manages to do this gracefully and in the span of 212 pages is remarkable. More artful still is how the story’s formal transformation from realist to philosophical/surrealist is mirrored by the unnamed heroine’s metamorphosis, her awakening to her ability to rebuild herself.
The novel takes its title from a poem by the Turkish mystic poet Rumi, and this title distills the essence of the book: The heroine has been a competitive diver, and she has left her old identity, “her clothes,” behind in Florida and fled to Casablanca after the collapse of her marriage and the loss of a child. In the course of her adventures in Morocco, she is called by many names, none of them her own, some of them of her own invention. She is a twin, we learn rather early on, but her identity is doubled again and again: The police return the wrong passport and wallet to her after hers is stolen, but she looks like the rightful owner and finds herself passing as this other woman; she becomes a stand-in for a famous actress on the set of a movie that’s filming in her hotel; she is mistaken for the actress by the paparazzi and looks so much like her that the photos go viral and cause a scandal for the actress. The abundance of these incidents of mistaken and assumed identity suggest that Vida’s story has moved out of the realist mode and into something casually absurdist, philosophical. This is what life does to us, she seems to say through her symbolic plot: It renames us, reshapes us—knocks down the house of cards and asks us to rebuild. The myriad incidents of disguise, the parade of new names only make explicit what was already true of the heroine when she boarded the plane for Morocco: Her old life is over, and she is becoming someone else.
Rumi’s poem is also the key to the novel’s most immediately striking formal approach: Vida writes in the second person—the novel is addressed to “you.” The second person is perhaps the rarest of literary points of view. Jay McInerney used it in Bright Lights, Big City and Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom, but the most recent and most successful practitioner of the mode is Mohsin Hamid, author of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is addressed to “you,” a slightly uncomfortable American traveller in Lahore, sitting across from and listening to the history of the novel’s once-Americanized Pakistani protagonist who has returned to Pakistan and traditional life and turned against American culture and politics. Hamid has described the appeal of this formal choice as “an invitation” to the reader, and it does entice and startle to be so addressed. You feel the authorial eye upon you and a consciousness of self in a way you don’t with the solipsistic first (which may invite you to slip into the narrator’s skin, but still relies on empathy) and the God’s-eye-view of third.
Ultimately, Vida’s motivation in using the second person is to reveal her heroine’s divided self. This is not the heroine addressing me, the reader, but addressing her self, from whom she feels a sense of psychic distance after her catastrophic losses. Hamid has described The Reluctant Fundamentalist as “a divided man’s conversation with himself,” and Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is a similar sort of conversation. Vida’s heroine is going through the motions of living and her narration addressed to herself is a means of persuading herself to continue, to move forward in the absence of an authentic desire for life. Recollect, if you know it, the “Wiggle your big toe” scene in Kill Bill. Uma Thurman’s character has just awoken from a coma and regains the ability to walk by commanding her body to move, starting with her big toe. Both women are willing themselves back into the land of the living.
“You are yourself the animal we hunt when you come with us on the hunt,” Rumi writes in his “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty,” and so Vida’s heroine is a woman both searching and sought. Rumi’s poem captures the sense of the divided self that is the engine of Vida’s novel—the story of a woman who has made herself a fugitive from her family, her country, and even her name in a heartbroken attempt to rebuild herself. This is one of the oldest stories in the West—the search for self. “You are the man you seek,” Tiresias tells Oedipus when the king consults the famous seer about the cause of the plague devastating his city. And this is Vida’s heroine’s plight too. “You’re the person you’ve been looking for!” a fellow tourist tells her as she arrives back at their tour bus. The whole group has been searching for a missing member, but they’ve figured out in her absence that the heroine is the one they have been looking for: She was counted twice (doubled again) because she changed seats (though they don’t know she was counted once in a wig and once without it, the result of her misadventure with the paparazzi). But, of course, this line echoes beyond the confines of this particular—and particularly surreal—scene.
In one of the book’s funniest and most understated lines, the heroine tells herself, “You have not been yourself lately.” With her borrowed clothes and her string of assumed names, she certainly has not, but this is okay, Vida seems to say: We’re all ourselves and not ourselves—liars and truth-tellers by turns. There is no fixed, ironclad self and sometimes the only way forward is to shed the old skin. It is not accidental that the heroine is hired as a stand-in for an actress (the heroine’s job being to imitate the actress’s imitation of life). In one of the book’s most moving scenes, the heroine bests the famous actress in her performance of tears because she is genuinely overwhelmed by memories of her lost family—and so devastation becomes the source of triumph and the line between true and false is blurred irrecoverably.
There are shades of Patricia Highsmith here, too—her slippery Ripley, the man of many faces and many ways; her taste for doubles and counterfeits—but Vida’s chameleon ethos isn’t sinister; it’s ultimately liberating and affirmative. In Highsmith’s “The Great Cardhouse,” the eccentric Lucien Montlehuc collects counterfeit paintings by Italian masters, contending that authentic paintings are “too easy, too boring.” He sees infinitely more effort and artistry in the act of imitating perfectly the spontaneous work of genius. Vida asks us to look at her heroine the way Highsmith’s Lucien looks at his forgeries: as all the more impressive because she continues to perform life in whatever guise presents itself even when everything that had shaped and given meaning to her life is gone. She is a shape-shifter not because she is a criminal but because the old life is irrecoverable and the only way to survive is to keep moving—to be whatever’s asked until some semblance of a real taste for life, and a real sense of self, returns. “Extreme circumstances require radical change,” a Darwin enthusiast tells the heroine, “If you want to survive at least.”
Emily Colette Wilkinson is a writer and teacher living in Washington, DC. She is a winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review's Young Reviewers Contest and has taught most recently at Episcopal High School and The College of William & Mary.
