White Oleander is a coming-of-age novel. That’s not uncommon for an early effort, but Janet Fitch, who had also spent time as a journalist, was not interested in writing autobiography. Her subject, rather, was Los Angeles, where multiple generations of her family have lived. Narrated by a young woman named Astrid, whom we meet at 12 and follow through adolescence, the book is an episodic paean to a city where dreams often devolve into degradation and despair is the flip side of desire.
“The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert,” Fitch begins the novel, “shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves.” There you have it: Joan Didion’s rattlesnake in the ivy, danger at the heart of daily life. For Astrid, this becomes a virulent reality after her mother poisons a faithless lover and is arrested and the girl ends up in the Los Angeles County foster care system.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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As Astrid moves from home to home, White Oleander frames the city’s tapestry of communities. From Hollywood to the Fairfax District to the Valley, Fitch parses the differences with subtlety and nuance. “The air in Van Nuys,” she writes in one particularly vivid instance, “was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga. It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter-mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high.”
It’s the sort of observation, the sort of distinction, only a real Angeleno would make.
This is important because the novel serves as an act of literary reclamation, an attempt to write about the city on its own terms. Twenty-six years after publication, White Oleander remains remarkable for the clarity of its understanding, the lens through which it reveals Los Angeles. Yes, there is sprawl, and smog, and Santa Ana winds—signifiers by which Southern California has come to be defined. But more essentially, as Fitch understands, there are the neighborhoods, each with its own distinct personality and texture, its own identity and voice.•
