A NOVEL DEBUT

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thirved, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.

“Oleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.” She held up her large hand and spread the fingers, let the desert dryness lick through.

–from “White Oldeander”

Janet Fitch sits in a coffeehouse, sipping a large cup of juice and eating a sandwich, her face occasionally breaking into a Cheshire cat grin. Through the plate glass window behind her, cars rush along Glendale Boulevard, while around the corner, the Silver Lake reservoir sparkles in the sun. It’s a placid, peaceful day in early summer, the kind when California still seems to hold some hidden promise, and here in Fitch’s neighborhood, there is a palpable air of contentment, of something like good luck. The irony is that until recently, Fitch notes, the very notion of luck was “quite outside my frame of reference. In my life, you work hard for everything you get. There is no such thing as luck.”

These days, Fitch is in the enviable position of having to rethink that opinion, as she contends with a luck beyond most writers’ dreams. In early May, her first novel, “White Oleander” (Little, Brown; $24), was named the latest selection of Oprah’s Book Club, the kind of unexpected miracle that can change the entire shape and texture of a career–one that, in this case, has barely begun. A few months ago, after all, Fitch was just another debut novelist, happy that “White Oleander” had been published with a respectable press run of 20,000 and was receiving good reviews. Now, there are 875,000 copies of the novel in print, and the third-generation Angeleno is in the midst of a national book tour that is taking her from Southern California to cities like Chicago, New York and Vero Beach.

“It’s like you’re surfing,” she laughs, “with a little California shorty board in two- or three-foot swells, and then suddenly the Big Kahuna comes in, and whoa, surf’s up.”

Yet if Fitch still views her great good fortune with something akin to incredulity, she has no illusions about the freedom it may bring. “What this means,” she says, “is that I get to have a career. That’s always a question if you’re a literary writer. Do you get to have a career, or do you keep doing odd jobs and write? So the Oprah thing is like the fairy godmother coming down while you’re sweeping up the ashes on the hearth, and suddenly, you get to go to the ball.”

If the idea of Oprah as some kind of literary fairy godmother sounds a bit, well, overstated, there’s also something appropriate about the analogy, for Fitch’s career has a certain Cinderella quality to it, an aura of perseverance redeemed. Although she’s been a writer for two decades, it was only five years ago, when she began to work on “White Oleander” in earnest, that Fitch realized she wanted to be a novelist at all. Before that, she spent several years employed as a journalist, then worked on a number of unsuccessful screenplays–she even attended USC Film School briefly during the mid-1980s–before deciding to try her hand at writing stories, a decision that eventually led to her publishing work in small literary journals like Black Warrior Review and Rain City Review. “White Oleander,” in fact, had its genesis as a piece of short fiction–until, that is, Fitch submitted it to the Ontario Review, a magazine edited by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who responded with a handwritten note in which she rejected the story for being too long, but suggested that it might make a strong first chapter for a book.

“It was a little Post-It note,” Fitch, 43, recalls. “I had it up on my computer for years. And I thought, well, gee, Joyce Carol Oates thinks this sounds like the first chapter of a novel. I think I want to try that out.”

What distinguishes “White Oleander” from the majority of first novels is that it’s not autobiographical, at least not in any obvious way. Rather, the book traces, often graphically, the six-year passage of an adolescent girl named Astrid through the ambiguous nightmare of foster care, where she ends up after her mother, a self-absorbed and manipulative poet, is sent to prison for poisoning a former lover. The foster-care world is one with which Fitch has been fascinated since elementary school, when she watched a friend disappear into the system, leaving her with a sense of the ephemerality of human relations, the way someone could “vanish through no fault of their own.” With this as the novel’s emotional subtext, Fitch put up fliers at community colleges, Planned Parenthood offices, 12-step meetings–“places I thought young women would congregate”–looking for former foster daughters who wanted to talk.

“I got so many details,” she says. “What’s your first thought when you move in? What stays with you after it’s over? How has it changed you as an adult? One woman said it’s like you’re always auditioning. You’re always trying to figure out where you’re at.” It is by evoking these specifics that Fitch gets at the reality of Astrid’s experiences, making them complex, three-dimensional; although as the narrative progresses, the character endures both sexual impropriety and physical violence, she also finds connection in the least likely places, discovering that even the worst situations are often tempered with a peculiar grace.

“You look to art,” Fitch notes, “for something that’s true, not something that’s simplified, categorized, labeled. In life, bad people can do you a good turn. And good people sometimes screw you up.”

In that regard, what Fitch has done with “White Oleander” is to write a novel that also functions as a work of social archeology, an excavation of our ongoing efforts to balance past and present, memory and forgetting, the people we are and those we wish to become. To a large extent, actually, the book exists in the middle territory between all these influences, an interior landscape where Astrid must take the fragments of her life and integrate them into a sense of self. Such a process, Fitch believes, is endemic to our current historical moment, when traditional social structures have become hopelessly fragmented, and the absolutes upon which we once depended are no longer relevant.

“In America,” she says, “at the end of the 20th Century, everybody has to assemble an identity. We’re not, `I was born here, I was raised here, I think the way my Daddy thought’–that’s history. There are a wealth of opposing points-of-view, and you put together an identity from all the pieces. And every thinking person has that job.”

This is the burden faced by Astrid, who not only must come to terms with her mother, but with everyoneelse who has helped to shape her, the half a dozen or so lives of which she is a part. There may be no more vivid a metaphor for this than the art project she develops during the novel’s final pages, in which each of these people is represented by a kind of private altar, composed of objects arranged inside a suitcase to make a portable, and personal, museum.

“In the end,” Fitch declares, “I wanted to show that the people who form you remain with you. And you yourself are the suitcase carrying all this around.”

Now that “White Oleander” is out in the world, it, too, has become its own type of suitcase, another variation on the portable museum. This, of course, is as it should be, although with all the buzz surrounding the novel, Fitch has had a hard time moving on.

“I haven’t had time to do anything,” she acknowledges, taking a long pull from her juice. “I had something I started after I sent the novel off, but ultimately there wasn’t enough there. Then the book sold, and I was doing copy editing, and after it came out, the Oprah thing happened, and here it’s been two months.”

In many ways, that makes for yet another irony, because to gain the freedom represented by Oprah’s Book Club, Fitch has temporarily had to give up writing. But she just takes it all in stride.

“My guess,” she says, “is that after Labor Day, this should settle down a great deal. Then it’s back to work.”

Originally Published: July 14, 1999 at 1:00 AM CDT