It’s tempting to imagine that Janet Fitch’s first novel for adults, White Oleander, came out of nowhere, but that’s not quite the case. Published in 1999, the novel was almost immediately selected by Oprah’s Book Club—in that era, perhaps the most visible arbiter of literary taste in the United States. Fitch, however, had been in the trenches for better than a decade, trying her hand as a screenwriter before shifting to short fiction; an early attempt to reckon with White Oleander appeared in 1994 in the journal Black Warrior Review. It was less this publication, however, than a prior rejection from Ontario Review, whose editor, Joyce Carol Oates, suggested the manuscript read like an opening chapter, that spurred Fitch to consider going long.
“It was a little post-it note,” she has previously confided about the project. “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.”
As should go without saying, she had no idea where it might lead.
White Oleander is a coming-of-age novel. That’s not uncommon for an early effort, but Fitch, who had also spent time as a journalist, was not interested in 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 the 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, the 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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To gather the necessary details, Fitch interviewed women who had been fostered; what she learned adds to the novel’s verisimilitude. But even more, as Astrid moves across the Los Angeles Basin, from home to home and family to family, 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.
What renders this important is the way the novel then 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 as it is. Yes, there is sprawl, and smog, and Santa Ana winds—all the 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.•
Join us on March 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Fitch will sit down with special guest Dylan Landis and host John Freeman to discuss White Oleander. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
