Do you know where your parents are?

Dec. 31--Novelists can spend decades trying to resolve their great themes, but after three books Vendela Vida clearly knows what her Big Idea is: escape. For "Girls on the Verge" (2000), she interviewed young women around the country to learn how they break free from adolescence and shift into adulthood. The heroine of her debut novel, "And Now You Can Go" (2004), leaves her native New York for San Francisco and the Philippines after she's confronted by a gunman. Vida, coeditor of Believer magazine, addresses the concept again in "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name," her powerful second novel, and she gives it a disarming intensity. Here the identity crisis is so deep that it requires a trip from New York to Helsinki, then north of the Arctic Circle.

Within the space of a week, Clarissa, a 29-year-old New Yorker, is pummelled by more and more bad news. Her father has died of a heart attack, and because her mother disappeared years ago she's left to handle funeral arrangements and sort through his paperwork. While doing so, she uncovers her birth certificate, which contains a crushing revelation: A man she has never met or even heard of is apparently her father. That leads to yet another blow: Pankaj, her fiance, has known for years that Clarissa's dad was not her biological father.

She feels devoid of anything resembling a family or a past, incapable of trusting anyone, and Vida's clean, simple, dispassionate prose reflects that hollowness. Clarissa imagines running away from Pankaj: "I would travel to Missoula or Memphis and find a man who fixed planes or raced horses and didn't need love, who hadn't loved anyone. ... He and I would know no one else in the world."

In truth, she travels much farther. Without telling anyone, she flies from New York to Helsinki, then makes a 21-hour trek by train and bus to Inari, a town in Finnish Lapland that's home to Eero, the man named on her birth certificate. The climate gives her the distance and isolation she craves, but little comfort: Eero, who knew Clarissa's mother when she was researching the native Sami people there, may not be her biological father, and her mother, whom she imagined dead, may be living nearby. Ultimately the emptiness of her unfamiliar environment becomes yet another torment: Her mind swims with memories of her mother as well as her own childhood and early adulthood, much of which were defined by fear and sexual violence.

Although at its core the novel is about a struggle for some kind of family reconciliation, Vida has worked hard to extract anything in plot or prose that smacks of sentimentality or tidy solutions. Clarissa tends to be aloof, often downright rude, and she describes human interactions in metaphorically mechanical terms: She falls into bed with a man whose fingers taste "like coins"; the rush of water at a dam sounds like "an untuned organ," and a cup of warm reindeer blood tastes "like electricity."

While the closing pages might satisfy a reader's expectations of a confrontation, the resolution confounds those expectations. And although the mood throughout is chilly, Clarissa has a depth and self-awareness that justify her clinical approach to the world. By the end of this spare, unflinching novel, Vida has successfully gotten away with a provocative assertion: There's no such thing as closure, and sometimes the best way to heal a family is to rip yourself away from it entirely.

Mark Athitakis is arts editor at Washington City Paper in Washington, D.C.

LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME

By: Vendela Vida.

Publisher: Ecco, 240 pages, $23.95.

Review: In clean, simple prose, Vida spins a novel of disarming intensity around a young woman's search for family and identity.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Star Tribune, Minneapolis

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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