When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically,” Jean Rhys writes in her gimlet-eyed novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the tale of what happens when a woman leaves her last older lover and goes home. “And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be.”
The passage from childhood to Pygmalion existence is the core of Janet Fitch’s glittering and wrenching debut novel, White Oleander, now over 25 years old and just as explosive as it was when it was published, when there were 567,000 children in foster care nationwide.
Astrid Magnussen is just one fictional life among that terrifying number. Not long after Fitch’s novel opens, Astrid’s mother, Ingrid, murders her boyfriend and goes away to prison, leaving her daughter to fight her way through the system on her own, turning this way and that to search for love.
The void Ingrid leaves behind is immense—not simply because she is a mother. She is a force of nature: beautiful, honest, a poet, and the kind of woman who cuts a man for messing with her. She teaches her daughter it’s a man’s world and gives her adult advice at a child’s age: Don’t let them stay overnight. Don’t let them fool you. She encourages Astrid to be watchful, careful, and fierce.
“How many children had this happened to,” Astrid wonders after she lands in the home of an ex-stripper in South Los Angeles with two kids of her own and another she’s already fostering. “How many children were like me, floating like plankton on the wide ocean? I thought how tenuous the links between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.”
White Oleander is at its most heartbreaking when Astrid narrates within a partial understanding of her own fate—seeking affection to replace what she has lost, often in dangerous places. The shock of becoming a foster child hasn’t worn off before she realizes she needs to jockey for affection—not with the other children, but with her foster mother, who becomes jealous that Astrid will steal her man. (In this case, a nearly 50-year-old Vietnam War veteran.) As it turns out, at 14 years old, Astrid had actually begun to fantasize about doing just that.
Swerving across the Valley, from South L.A. to the desert, from Melrose to the beach, White Oleander becomes a kind of child’s odyssey home. At each stage, Astrid confronts a new siren, singing a tune to remake her. In Hollywood, a woman in exile from Argentina acts as if suffering will make Astrid whole, so she starves her and the other girls of the house; in Melrose, a failed actress turns Astrid into her nurse, her confidant.
Astrid begins to treat each of these episodes like its own miniature Hollywood film role—she is the seductress, the deformed servant, the brilliant ingenue, a recovering addict. The thematic handle helps her understand how to be. In some cases, Astrid can’t help but note that the families are all enacting their idea of family like theater, too. And very often the cracks in the stage emerge quickly—a father doesn’t come home at Christmas, unraveling all the fine trappings of a family holiday.
It’s understandable why, with such scrambled signals and her mother writing nasty-grams to her from prison, some full of poisonous advice that reveal the depth of her mental instability, Astrid would make so many errors of judgment. Astrid needs tenderness so badly that she often mistakes influence over her for it. In one foster home, a beautiful Black woman next door catches Ingrid’s fancy for the freedom with which she lives, the style. “I wanted to find out more,” Astrid thinks. “I wanted Olivia to handle my future like wax, softening it in the heat of her parched hands.”
White Oleander is a fascinating study in inheritance. Even as she struggles with the wisdom or lack thereof of her mother’s advice, Astrid remains very much her mother’s daughter. She is a fool for love and so linguistically gifted that each page of this novel book shimmers with a hallucinatory clarity. The seasons are marked by new winds and new fires, the white oleander of the title in flame, just like Astrid’s beauty and youth. The desert-rain smell of chaparral washes over the action in points. The Santa Anas buffet the city like a mythical force. Spring arrives like a sentence, summer like a simile. “By April,” Fitch writes through her heroine’s eyes in one section, “the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper.”
Astrid also describes characters with the intensity of a poet—especially her mother, who appears to her early on “like a patient hawk on top of a lightning struck tree.” This gift with words eventually catches up with Astrid’s reality, as she finds herself in one fractured home after another, whether it’s a couple passing her “back and forth like a side dish at dinner” or her sitting there unobserved, not a piece of emotional blackmail, but just part of the room while two women talk and their talk goes on “ceaseless as waves.”
Among the most wrenching moments is when even in moments of neglect, Astrid feels for the people who have taken her in, as with the failed actress in Melrose. Lonely-hearted, the actress begins to drink again. Her absent husband scolds her as Astrid listens. “What struck me was not so much that he could talk about sending me back, like a dog you got from the pound when it dug up the yard and ruined the carpets. It was the reasonableness of his tone, caring but detached, like a doctor. It was the only reasonable thing, the voice said. It just wasn’t working out.”
Following Astrid on her journey to independence is not easy. Watching her absorb the blows of her own awareness has a documentary power. Only a monster could read this book without wondering about children navigating this situation today, what they face. Somehow White Oleander never becomes overwhelmed by its own story, though. Like a map made of girlhood, the novel also shows that the landscape of this time of life—who is there, what they do, how they stand over a girl—is causality, but it is not inevitable. It is not fate. At least that is what Astrid tries to take from it, as she learns to fashion her own existence. Her own self. Not made of wax, but of ideas and perception, art and something more substantial than the wind.•
Join us on March 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Janet Fitch will sit down with Dylan Landis and host John Freeman to discuss White Oleander. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
