'White Oleander': Mother's in Jail, But Her Daughter Is the Prisoner

April 30, 1999

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

hite Oleander," Janet Fitch's affecting but overwrought first novel, is set in a Los Angeles that's part James M. Cain, part Joan Didion. The Santa Ana winds blow relentlessly in Ms. Fitch's L.A., sowing fires and migraines and discord. It is a place painted in the colors of film noir, a place where the hot wind smells of laurel and creosote, and the toxic oleander plant thrives. It is a place where lovers who kill one another "blame it on the wind."

The murder that takes place in the opening pages of "White Oleander" is committed by the narrator's mother, an imperious, narcissistic poet named Ingrid Magnussen who poisons her boyfriend Barry when he tries to dump her. Ingrid has long since dumped the father of her daughter, Astrid; and with her mother's arrest and sentencing to prison, 12-year old Astrid suddenly finds herself without a family. Her reminiscences recount the picaresque story of her journey through Los Angeles' labyrinthine foster care system, while chronicling her efforts to come to terms with her formidable and frightening mother.

Although the mother-daughter portrait in these pages will doubtless be compared to the one Mona Simpson drew in her powerful 1986 novel "Anywhere but Here," the two books vary widely in their effects. This novel not only lacks the nuanced, psychological detail of "Anywhere" but it also tries to do something very different. Whereas Ms. Simpson carefully delineated the day-to-day life shared by her heroine and her heroine's mother, Ms. Fitch is more concerned with the ghostlike role that the ferocious Ingrid plays in her daughter's memory once she has left for prison.

Ingrid assumes a kind of mythic stature in her daughter's imagination. Astrid will continually measure herself against the standards of her mother's beauty and fearlessness (and find herself lacking) while at the same time learning to hate her mother for her selfishness, her cruelty and her ability to manipulate and charm. Throughout her peregrinations from one foster home to another, she will look for another woman to fill her mother's role, to provide the love and sustenance she never had at home.

Ms. Fitch's descriptions of those disparate foster homes provide the reader with a sociological tour through a veritable cross section of Los Angeles. Astrid's first foster mother, a former topless waitress named Starr, buys her new clothes (a tight pink dress and matching pink high-heeled shoes) and has her baptized as a born-again Christian; Starr will later shoot Astrid with a .38 caliber pistol when she learns that Astrid has been having sex with Starr's boyfriend Ray.

Ray's observation that he is married but hasn't seen his wife in two or three years makes Astrid feel dizzy, "like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on." With the disintegration of her own family, she realizes, she has entered a world of permanent flux. "This was the life I was going to be living," she thinks, "everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too."

Astrid's subsequent foster parents include Ed and Marvel Turlock, a lower-middle-class couple who use her as a maid and baby sitter for their children; a wealthy Argentine exile named Amelia Ramos who starves the children she takes into her home, and a hard-drinking trash picker named Rena Grushenka who teaches her wards how to go through other people's garbage and recycle their finds as flea-market treasures.

For a time Astrid finds happiness with an impossibly perfect Hollywood couple named Ron and Claire Richards. He is a television producer and she is an actress, and they live in a "Leave It to Beaver" cute house. Claire nurtures Astrid's gifts as an artist, enrolling her in classes at the local museum, and she encourages her to sign up for honors classes in high school. Astrid will later learn that Claire is a deeply troubled manic depressive, fearful of losing her husband and fearful of the outside world.

When Ingrid hears of her daughter's wonderful new life, her possessiveness turns toxic. She tells Astrid she would rather see her "in the worst kind of foster hell than with a woman like that," and she begins writing to Claire, playing upon her insecurities and doubts. When Claire commits suicide, Astrid blames her mother. She must later decide whether she should help her mother try to appeal her sentence.

Such melodramatic developments fuel the roller-coaster narrative of "White Oleander." Ms. Fitch displays an irritating penchant for punctuating Astrid's story every few dozen pages with a terrible event (from a shooting to a dog attack to an assault by other children) as well as an intermittent taste for romance-novel prose. ("So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.")

What keeps "White Oleander" from devolving into a television mini-series is Ms. Fitch's aptitude for delineating Astrid's inner life, for showing us the pull she feels between her mother (and her mother's destructive impulses) and her own need for independence; for showing us her craving for family and the slowly dawning recognition that she must invent herself. The resulting novel is frequently obvious and over the top but at the same time oddly haunting.