White Oleander

Man, that Oprah knows how to pick ’em! This was a terrific read; I’m not sure why I’d never gotten to it before. I read huge chunks during my travel to the States and then slowed down quite a bit, which was a shame because it meant I felt less connected to Astrid’s later struggles in the foster care system. It’s an atmospheric novel full of oppressive Los Angeles heat and a classic noir flavor that shades into gritty realism as it goes on, taking us from when Astrid is 12 to when she’s a young woman out in the world on her own.

Astrid’s mother Ingrid, an elitist poet, becomes obsessed with a lover who spurned her and goes to jail for his murder. Bouncing between foster homes and children’s institutions, Astrid is plunged into a world of sex, drugs, violence and short-lived piety. “Like a limpet I attached to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention,” she writes. Her role models change over the years, but always in the background is the icy influence of her mother, through letters and visits. Fitch’s writing is sumptuous, as in a house “the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare.” I might have liked a tiny bit more of Ingrid in the book, but I can still recommend this one wholeheartedly as summer reading.

Favorite lines:

The knock-out opening two lines: “The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blossoms, their dagger green leaves.”

“I couldn’t imagine my mother in prison. She didn’t smoke or chew on toothpicks. She didn’t say ‘bitch’ or ‘fuck.’ She spoke four languages, quoted T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, drank Lapsang souchong out of a porcelain cup. She had never been inside a McDonald’s. She had lived in Paris and Amsterdam. Freiburg and Martinique. How could she be in prison?”

“My scars were my face, my past was my life.”

“It was my legacy, wasn’t it, to shed lives like snakeskin, a new truth for each new page, a moral amnesiac?”

If nothing else, read this book for the language. White Oleander reads like a poem. It's so beautifully crafted.

“If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

Ingrid Magnusson is sent to jail for the murder of her ex-boyfriend, leaving her daughter, Astrid, to enter the foster care system.

White Oleander is pure poetry. The writing is absolutely exquisite - it’s one of those books where you keep pausing just to inhale really moving and poignant prose. I would happily read anything else Janet Fitch has written/will write, as she has blown me away!

The mother/daughter relationship between Ingrid and Astrid is complex, flawed and difficult. The influence that one person can hold over you is quite scary - even though Ingrid is in prison, she still exerts this weird control over Astrid from afar. Her relationship with her mother is something that Astrid struggles with, as well as the lack of a father during her youth. Fitch handles these themes and topics with a deft hand, I really didn’t want this one to end.

Following Astrid through a sequence of different foster homes is really heartbreaking, but each new home brings vibrant and strong characters, each with their own issues. Claire in particular was a standout for me, I loved the relationship that formed between her and Astrid, even though Claire herself was also a fragile soul.

I would 100% recommend this to anyone who loves reading about complicated family dynamics, in particular the frayed relationship that can exist between mothers and daughters. This book was fantastic!

I’m also still fangirling over the fact that Fitch messaged me personally on goodreads to say she enjoyed reading my reviews and was looking forward to reading more! I’ll mark that down as one of my greatest bookish moments! 4.5 stars.

very mixed feelings, rtc

White Oleander is the story of love, life, pain, pain, and more pain. Young Astrid is left to fend for herself after her mother is imprisoned for murder. Astrid jumps from foster home to foster home. Forced to fall in and out of love, desperate for a place to call her own.

Ingrid, Astrid's mother is a talented poet. Because of this, sometimes the writing was fraught with flowery prose that felt heavy. I hated Ingrid's character, and felt she should not be allowed to have an ounce of redemption. She was selfish at her core--she didn't deserve to have even the gift to write. She would have been better as a crackhead--fitting of her character.

It's gut-wrenching to imagine the pain that foster children endure. There were times Astrid was desperate to be someone's anything. Again, the awful mother, a wicked stepmother more than a real mother, selfish and sex starved, ignored her daughters most basic needs in the name of art. This made me thing of ego-driven, self-proclaimed intellectuals, too self-centered to care for anyone but themselves.

Overall, a tough read, with attention to extravagant, romantic writing. It may have been better as a poem.

3.5/5 stars.

I only wish there were a star less than one. I wish I could remove stars. I wish there were a star deficit rating.

This book almost made me give up reading all together. It is definitely the last book I trusted from Oprah. I still think she owes me money and those days of my life back.

It was page after page of the most depressing writing I've ever read with absolutely no pay off.

After reading her scorching short story in Los Angeles Noir, I smoked a cigarette (I don't smoke), napped and reached for a novel by Janet Fitch. Round 2 is White Oleander, which Oprah's Book Club made a sweepstakes winner at the time of its publication in 1999 and for good reason. This is fiction at its most intoxicating, with boozy prose but also beautifully woven narrative, without a single lull in story or a character who fails to make a mark. Its vision and breadth reminded me of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, with a teenage girl in Los Angeles surviving a succession of mentors that mold her into an adult.

The novel is narrated by Astrid Magnussen, who introduces herself at the age of 12 living in a crummy Hollywood apartment with her mother Ingrid. Employed as a layout designer for a movie magazine when she's not hustling books of her poems, Ingrid is devoted to aesthetics. She's trucked Astrid from Paris to Amsterdam to Mexico and takes her to work as well, certain that her daughter's needs can be met in the audience of her mother. At her poetry reading, Ingrid is approached by Barry Kolker, a chubby, dark and slovenly dressed man who Ingrid rejects on sight, but whose self-confidence and persistence gradually wins her over.

Having never known her father, Astrid is encouraged that Barry might make them a family, as well as provide stability in her life. Outside of drawing, life revolves around her mother. This takes a turn for the worse when Barry breaks off contact with Ingrid, crushing her self-esteem and drawing Viking retribution. The police come for her and Astrid spends the next year in a fugue state, watching her zombie-eyed mother sentenced to thirty-five years to life. She's ultimately placed with her first foster family, adopted by a born-again stripper named Starr who lives in Tujunga with her four children in a trailer. On visiting day, a van transports Astrid to Chino to sit with her mother.

I looked into her determined face, cheekbones like razors, her eyes making me believe. "I was afraid you'd be mad at me."

She stretched me out at arm's length to look at me, her hands gripping my shoulders. "Why would you think that?"

Because I couldn't lie well enough. But I couldn't say it.

She hugged me again. Those arms around me made me want to stay there forever. I'd rob a bank and get convicted so we could always be together. I wanted to curl up in her lap, I wanted to disappear into her body, I wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck.

"Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?"

"Not as much as I hurt them," she said, and I knew she was smiling, though all I could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned. I had to pull away a little to see her. Yes, she was smiling, her half-smile, the little comma-shaped curve at the corner of her mouth. I touched her mouth. She kissed my fingers.

"They assigned me to office work. I told them I'd rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don't much care for me. I'm on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire. I'm considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won't tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve." She stuck her nose in my hair, she was smelling me. "Your hair smells of bread, Clover and nutmeg. I want to remember you just like this, in that sadly hopeful pink dress, and those bridesmaid, promise-of-prom-night pumps. Your foster mother's, no doubt. Pink being the ultimate cliché."

Left to survive on her own, Astrid accepts some of the messages she hears at the Truth Assembly of Christ and grows close to Starr's carpenter boyfriend, a Vietnam veteran named Ray. Starr grows suspicious of her adopted daughter but Astrid convinces her that not only is an affair preposterous, but sending her back would only push Ray away. Astrid soon consummates a relationship with him anyway and to cope with her doubts, Starr returns to booze. When it comes time for her to move on, Astrid has to be taken away in an ambulance. Recovering from her wounds, she's adopted by Marvel Turlock. Next stop: Van Nuys.

Marvel enlists Astrid as a servant but provides a kind of stability she's never known. Now fourteen, Astrid becomes fascinated by a debonair neighbor named Olivia Johnstone who Marvel has disparaged as a "whore." Earning Olivia's trust, Astrid learns that she was a loan officer who parlayed her beauty and charm to profit handsomely from a number of suitors. The friendship continues to mold and harden the girl and results in her being sent back. Considered a problem child, Astrid is placed with Amelia Ramos, an interior decorator who uses the adoption assistance checks for four girls to renovate her Hollywood home, starving her charges with only one meal per day.

Astrid endears herself to a new case worker, a screenwriter gathering material, to find placement with her dream foster mother, a childless young actress named Claire Richards. Astrid even gets along with her new foster father, who travels often producing a paranormal TV series. Astrid learns her role here is to watch over Claire, clinically depressed and possibly suicidal from lack of love from her husband. She does her best but with a year left of high school, is on the move again, this time to a hovel in Sunland, where her new foster mother Rena Gruschenka strips Astrid of her pride but replaces it with something more valuable.

Rena turned her head to the side, shaded her eyes with her hand, glanced at me, then went back to sunny-side up. "You are Russian I think. A Russian always ask, what is meaning of life." She pulled a long, depressed face. "What is meaning of life, maya liubov? Is our bad weather. Here is California, Astrid darling. You don't ask meaning. Too bad Akhmatova, but we got beach volleyball, sports car, tummy tuck. Don't worry, be happy. Buy something."

She smiled to herself, arms down at her sides, eyes closed, glistening on her chaise lounge like bacon frying in a pan. Small beads of water clung to the tiny hairs of her upper lip, pooled between her breasts. Maybe she was the lucky one, I thought, a woman who had divested herself of both future and past. No dreams, no standards, a woman who smoked and drank and slept with men like Sergei, men who were spiritually what came up out of the sewers when it rained. I could learn from her. Rena Gruschenka didn't worry about her teeth, didn't take vitamin C. She ate salt on everything and was always drunk by three. She certainly didn't feel sick because she wasn't going to college and making something of her life. She lay in the sun and gave the workmen hard-ons while she could.

"You get a boyfriend, you stop worry," she said.

I didn't want to tell her I had a boyfriend. Hers.

There are novels that seem like they were written just for you. "Compelling female characters? Electric prose? Acidic wit? Fantastic dialogue? You like master-pupil stories, don't you? What about the ultimate L.A. novel? How about detail that's so sharp you draw blood? You'll have it. Read White Oleander." Janet Fitch does all of this in more ways than I have the space to describe, but her characters, particularly the incarcerated Viking mother Ingrid Magnussen (who could skin a Mama Grizzly for brunch) and the fatally weak Claire Richards will be with me for as long as any tragic character in Dickens or Maugham. I mean ...

By April, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper. The Hollywood Hills rose unnaturally clear, as if we were looking at them through binoculars. The new leaves were wilting in the heat that left us sweating and dispirited in the house with the blinds down.

Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto the bed, a pirate's treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.

"That was my great-aunt Priscilla's," Claire said. "She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War." She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. "She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman."

Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. I plucked an onyx ring from the pile between us on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. I slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit my smallest finger, above the knuckle. "Whose was this?" I held it out so she could see it without moving her head.

"Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne."

Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made me feel large and ill bred. I imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught my least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of me, my gawky arms and legs, I would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold-rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. I gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.

The garnet choker, icy around my neck, was a wedding present from her mill-owning Manchester great-grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes I balanced on my knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by her father's aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. I was wearing Claire's family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.

In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied. No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.

Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.

"They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman." She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn't want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I'd lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.

Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn't sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn't garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat. She didn't stake the flowers, and now they bloomed ragged, the second-year glads tilting to one side, Mexican evening primroses annexing the unmowed lawn.

Ron was away again, twice in one month, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypises. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead.

I could keep typing because White Oleander stays at that pitched level of character, black wit and psychological complexity for 446 pages, with the pulse of a mother-daughter relationship underneath and in climax, a memorable confrontation between them. Fitch is dialed in to the human condition, depicting how those we come into intimate contact with will hurt us, inspire us and chisel away at us to expose whoever we were destined to be. It's harrowing, it's real, it's rock 'n roll, it's one of the best novels I've read. In contrast to a lot of the others, this is also storytelling, constantly moving forward, never devolving into Writing while Astrid is on her journey.

Length: 138,086 words

The mesmerizing story of a young girl who gets tossed around the American foster care system after her mother is arrested for murdering a former lover. The writing is absolutely intoxicating. I can see why this one got so popular after its release.

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