White Oleander
Janet Fitch, 1999
Little, Brown & Co.
446 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316284950
Summary
Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery-but their idyll is shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover.
Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison. White Oleander is the unforgettable story of Astrid's journey through a series of foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become.
Tough, irrepressible, funny, and warm, Astrid is one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction. White Oleander is an unforgettable story of mothers and daughters, burgeoning sexuality, the redemptive powers of art, and the unstoppable force of the emergent self. Written with exquisite beauty and grace, this is a compelling debut by an author poised to join the ranks of today's most gifted novelists. (From the publisher.)
The novel's film version (2002) stars Alison Lohman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn, and Renee Zellwiger.
Author Bio
• Birth—1956
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Reed College
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles
Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become an historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction. "I wanted to Live, not spend my life in a library. Of course, my conception of being a writer was to wear a cape and have Adventures."
Since then, she has had more than a few Adventures. In addition, she has published short stories in literary journals such as Black Warrior Review, Rain City Review, and A Room of One's Own, briefly attended film school in the director's program at the University of Southern California, worked at various times as a typesetter, a proofreader, a graphic artist, a freelance journalist, the managing editor of American Film magazine, and the editor of the Mancos Times Tribune, a weekly newspaper in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. Currently, she reviews books for Speak magazine in San Francisco, and teaches fiction writing privately in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and eight year old daughter.
"White Oleander," the story which grew into her novel, was named as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 1994.
Interestingly enough, the story was rejected from the Ontario Review with a note from Joyce Carol Oates, stating that while she enjoyed it, it seemed more like the first chapter of a novel than a short story. It had not occurred to Fitch to extend the story, but she decided to take a chance on this advice and wrote her novel.
Her writing process is simple.
I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not," she says. "I never get inspired unless I'm already writing. I write every day, including weekends. For writers there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.
Her journalistic experience proved a vaccination against writer's block.
When I had the newspaper, I had to come up with 12 or 15 stories a week regardless of whether there was anything to write about. Someone would call me up and say, "My kid just caught a big fish, come over and take a picture of it." So you'd go take a picture of the fish and then interview the kid. What do you ask a kid who caught a big fish? "What kind of bait were you using? Where'd you catch it? What time of day was it?" I learned you could always write. You just couldn't be too perfectionistic about it.
But the artistry of her work, the lines that take the reader's breath away, were hard-won. "I could always tell a story," she said, "but I needed to learn the poetics of the literary craft." She found her mentor in the writer Kate Braverman, under whom she learned to work until she found the right word, the right sound.
Poetry plays a great part in her writing of prose fiction. "I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language. Their startling originality is a challenge. I like Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Sexton. There are parts of White Oleander which use cadences of Pound—whatever you think of Pound, there's a specific music to him. I like Kate Braverman's poetry and the late Donald Rawley's. A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words." (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Fitch is...concerned with the ghostlike role that the ferocious Ingrid plays in her daughter's memory once she has left for prison....What keeps White Oleander from devolving into a television mini-series is Ms. Fitch's aptitude for delineating Astrid's inner life....The...novel is frequently obvious and over the top but at the same time oddly haunting.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
A loosely stitched-together series of these worst nightmares: a mother who starves her young, a high-class prostitute, a suicidal fading actress, a tough-talking Russian flea-market hustler...Fitch's writing has trippy, visceral power, but the reader remains unconvinced that she hasn't just written this as an exercise in high-brow shock lit.
Alexandra Lange - New York Magazine
In Janet Fitch's first novel, White Oleander, Astrid Magnussen, a pliant 11-year-old, loses Ingrid, her mother—an arrogant feminist poet from Los Angeles—when the woman gets thrown in prison for poisoning her ex-boyfriend. By the time Astrid is 18, she is hard from years of San Fernando Valley foster care: from being shot by one "mother" for stealing her seven-fingered boyfriend, from being mauled by dogs on a suburban street, from being dropped by a high-class black hooker who's taught her about the rewards of cashmere and the weaknesses of men, from being forced into servitude by a racist blue-collar hag interested only in the bottled color of her own hair, from losing the one cultured and nurturing female in her teenage life to suicide. Despite her hardness, though, Astrid—who narrates this episodic drama—views her life always with openness and mostly with gratitude: Had her birth mother been the only woman to raise her, she would never have learned about the varieties of women and the myriad ways they suffer.
At the center of White Oleander is Astrid's ever-evolving relationship with Ingrid, pursued, for the most part, through the mail. At first the girl, more visually than verbally articulate, sends her mother drawings of the people looking after her, and Ingrid responds with sound warnings against the drug addicts and drunks she finds on the pages in front of her. After a while, though, as her daughter grows to love these women, the less than maternal inmate, angry and jealous, turns away from her and toward a growing audience of young female readers in love with the figure of the captive poet. And so Astrid suffers a double loss, emotional as well as physical. This is where Fitch does her best work: She shows that children can survive gunshot wounds, dog attacks, poverty, fatherlessness and even neglect, but that losing the love of a mother threatens them with losing themselves. It's hard to know whether the author means for her narrator to be unreliable or not. What are we supposed to think about a young woman who continues to look back with fondness on the many horrors of her childhood? Are we supposed to feel uplifted because, in spite of all the scars, she still has a heart? White Oleander has the feel of a book written over years in a workshop setting: Though the story doesn't quite add up—though it remains linear and rather simple-minded—you can appreciate the author's hard work and determination and the love of the community of women she weaves through the sentences. On occasion the book is a page-turner (it's amazing how compelling a child's misery can be), and always the characters are as real as the person who sleeps beside you. In the case of White Oleander, though, they always leave.
Trish Deitch Roher - Salon
Thirteen-year-old Astrid Magnussen, the sensitive and heart-wrenching narrator of this impressive debut, is burdened with an impossible mother in Ingrid, a beautiful, gifted poet whose scattered life is governed by an enormous ego. When Ingrid goes to prison for murdering her ex-lover, Astrid enters the Los Angeles foster care program and is placed with a series of brilliantly characterized families. Astrid's first home is with Starr, a born-again former druggie, whose boyfriend, middle-aged Ray, encourages Astrid to paint (Astrid's absent father is an artist) and soon becomes her first lover, but who disappears when Starr's jealousy becomes violent. Astrid finds herself next at the mercy of a new, tyrannical foster mom, Marvel Turlock, who grows wrathful at the girl's envy of a sympathetic next-door prostitute's luxurious life. "Never hope to find people who will understand you," Ingrid archly advises as her daughter's Dickensian descent continues in the household of sadistic Amelia Ramos, where Astrid is reduced to pilfering food from garbage cans. Then she's off to the dream home of childless yuppies Claire and Ron Richards, who shower her with gifts, art lessons and the warmth she's been craving. But this new development piques Ingrid's jealousy, and Astrid, now 17 and a high school senior, falls into the clutches of the entrepreneurial Rena Grushenka. Amid Rena's flea-market wares, Astrid learns to fabricate junk art and blossoms as a sculptor. Meanwhile, Ingrid, poet-in-prison, becomes a feminist icon who now has a chance at freedom—if Astrid will agree to testify untruthfully at the trial. Astrid's difficult choice yields unexpected truths about her hidden past, and propels her already epic story forward, with genuinely surprising and wrenching twists. Fitch is a splendid stylist; her prose is graceful and witty; the dialogue, especially Astrid's distinctive utterances and loopy adages, has a seductive pull. This sensitive exploration of the mother-daughter terrain (sure to be compared to Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here) offers a convincing look at what Adrienne Rich has called "this womanly splitting of self," in a poignant, virtuosic, utterly captivating narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Fitch's startling debut novel is a raw and sorrow-filled exploration of the adolescence of the only child of a brilliant, selfish, and totally egocentric poet who was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing her lover. Etched with great suffering and amazing survival, White Oleander follows Astrid's torturous path from foster home to foster home, haunted by her mother's letters from jail and reflected in her own artistic vision. Alyssa Bresnahan fully inhabits the challenging and lyrical narrative through the voices of both daughter and mother, capturing the listener's full attention and heart as it becomes difficult to put aside and even harder to forget. An Oprah Book Club selection, the novel has a guaranteed popularity it richly deserves, and this audio version will win additional readers because of the perfect combination of this powerful story and characters with the skillful reading. Highly recommended. —Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Describe the relationship between Astrid and Ingrid early in the book. Why was Astrid fearful her mother would "fly away" if she mentioned she would have enjoyed having a father, summer camp, a Y program, or summer school?
2. Astrid said "My mother was not the least bit curious about me." (p. 10) How do you think that made this twelve year-old feel? What do you think that does to a child to come to that realization?
3. Why does Astrid express herself through her paintings and drawings versus words?
4. Discuss the symbolism of the wildfires and Astrid's coming of age, her desires, and her feelings?
5. Compare the characteristics of the white oleander to Ingrid. Then draw a comparison to the type of mother she was, and the type of prisoner she was. Can you compare any characteristics of the white oleander to Astrid?
6. Ingrid said in a passage "Isn't it funny, I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love." (p. 34) How does this come back to haunt her?
7. Astrid takes a few of her mother's things before the child welfare people take her away. What is the significance of the ex-acto knife? Of the kimono? What solace or strength do they offer her?
8. Although Astrid tells Paul "I don't let anyone touch me" (p.265) discuss how Claire touched her. Did others touch her as well? What is it about her experiences with people that make her feel this way? Discuss the powerful ways in which Astrid touched other people.
9. Why would Astrid choose Rena as her new foster mother versus Bill and Ann Greenway? Was she in some way trying to punish herself? Why did she feel she deserved Rena?
10. Discuss the various letters from mother to daughter, especially the one on p. 303. At what point did Astrid start to pull away from her mother emotionally? At what point was she snapped back?
11. Referring to her relationship with Ray, Astrid said "I was the snake in the garden." (p.93) How does this phrase relate to Marvel, Claire and Rena?
12. Why does Astrid wait several hours before alerting Ron to Claire's death? What in Astrid died at the same time?
13. Discuss Astrid's view of men. How does Ray compare to Ron? Does she blame men for the bad things that happen to women? Are women merely pawns in a man's world? How does she rise above this?
14. Why do you think Astrid always found herself in the position of caregiver to Starr's children, Marvel's children, and Claire when she was so deeply in need of care herself?
15. Life presents us with important lessons to be learned. What was the ultimate life lesson Astrid learned in her teenage journey? Why would she consider, and desire, a new life with her mother, yet not return to her in the end?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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