A writing teacher once told me to be careful about overusing adjectives. By over describing, and giving every shred of detail outright, he warned that I took away from my reader the pleasure of creating that place or thing in their own mind. He called it a “sign of overreaching, a signal of unsureness on the writer's part”. As a reader, I’m inclined to agree with him. As I make my way through a book, I appreciate being led, not pushed into making decisions about a character or a setting. I don’t want to be told that someone is racist, has poor taste, or lacks judgment. I want to make that decision myself after that character describes Oprah as “nothing but a fat nig-nog who doesn’t hold a candle to Sallie Jesse Raphael”. A skilled writer will make you work to be a part of the foreign world they create on the pages of your favorite book. You learn new slang, adapt to a character’s quirky pattern of speech. You create a road map in your mind of unfamiliar street names and building landmarks that you’ve never seen in real life. You imagine what an Oleander smells like, or what desert heat feels like even if you’ve spent your whole life surrounded by pine trees and coastal fog. And regardless of how exotic these new characters and places are, you relate. In providing some of the details and omitting others, the writer offers you the opportunity to find parts of yourself in even fictional characters. You recognize scenarios or emotions that are tangible memories, not simply created in the mind.
Astrid Magnussen’s life doesn’t resemble my own in any way. I stumbled upon her story accidentally while home faking sick from school one day in 1999. As I lounged in luxury, watching daytime television in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, I was introduced to her coming-of-age struggle through the Los Angeles County foster care system. Our positions in life couldn’t be more different; I lived a comfortable life with my family in rural Maine, she bounced from home to home after her mother was imprisoned for murder. I had friends at school and support from my teachers and parents, while Astrid dealt with domestic abuse, statutory rape, suicide, and isolation. Although chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection, Janet Fitch’s “White Oleander” lacked the irritating optimism that I identified with the Oprah Winfrey brand. As a somewhat depressed middle school student, I yearned to feel raw emotion good or bad, to have tragedy and drama and challenges in my life beyond petty squabbles on the playground and arguments with my parents over my clothing allowance. I was drawn to this novel, and devoured it cover to cover in one sitting. It remains one of my favorite books to this day.
Generally I gravitate towards memoirs and biographies, but of the hundreds of books that I own, I come back to “White Oleander” time and again. This novel, set in southern California, chronicles the fictional, extraordinary string of events that make up Astrid’s survivalist journey. Although I generally prefer to read about real people and real events, the world that Fitch creates is so authentic and believable, yet altogether alien, that it continues to offer me a unique type of escapism, and opportunity for self exploration each time I read it.
I’ve probably read this story six or seven times over the last decade. Initially I was drawn to Astrid’s story because I wanted to experience a world more exciting than my own. Subsequently I fell in love with the style of writing in this book, the juxtaposition between poetic tangents and specific descriptors. Fitch doesn’t shy away from foul language, sex, violence, or drugs. Nothing is gratuitous. Her confidence as a writer shines through in the decisions she makes about how much or how little to reveal about a specific character or events. Although she never reveals too much, she communicates each fragmented part of Astrid’s reality fully enough to offer a framework for exploring the very human, very relatable themes of love, loneliness, abandonment, self reliance, and ultimately survival.
This works very well on every level: it introduces the book; it's a personal essay, as well; it opens larger social and psychological perspectives beyone the book and beyond you.
ReplyDeleteAfter I first read your piece, I realized I had read a review of 'WO' before--possibly a professional review, possibly a student review. I googled the title, read the wiki article and then imagined a middleschooler girl reading a modern version of this timeless classic: a child adrift in a hard world, doing her best to make the world and herself mean something.
That story will never go out of fashion.
I could see its attraction--the book sounds like it does not go out of its way to shield the reader's eyes from the depths of human depravity, and we can never get enough of that, at least vicarously! And I understand very well (as you can see from the two reviews I did) that some books just have your number, and having fallen in love with them when young, you never fall out of love--there is something that pulls one back every few years.
Was this easy to write? Did you feel jinxed after last week or on your mettle or are you simply exhausted with 262 at this point?
It reads as if it went down quick and easy, did not require a lot of reworking, and as if you knew what you were doing throughout without needing to crank a lot of gears into motion--this graf may not read that way, but I am trying to compliment the style.
This one didn't actually go down very quickly. I wrote the second half three different times. In part, I didn't fully understand the assignment. I didn't know how much i was supposed to "give away" about the book. And I didn't want to just gush about loving something without giving a reason why. I also went on a tangent at one point about the complicated relationship between Astrid and her mother Ingrid and the parallel to my own complicated relationship with my mother (who was never convicted of murder, but somehow bothers me incessantly anyways) but that just got way out of hand and too far away from the main point which is the book itself, so I scrapped that. Working on a review of Elizabeth Wurtzel's second memoir "More Now Again", stay tuned.
ReplyDeleteAll the more credit to you if you had to sweat a bit to get this piece to read this smoothly--you fooled me!
ReplyDeleteI feel guilty every time a student says (as you have twice, I think) that she doesn't fully understand this assignment. A teacher is supposed to answer all questions, quell all doubt, have utter undying confidence....
Well, no, not actually--last semester I did most of the assignments I give out here, and I faced the same perennial questions you do, any student does, and any writer does. Some questions can only be answered by each individual sitting at the keyboard. You found all the answers in this intro: offering the subjective, the personal take on the book, and the more objective evaluation of it--everything in balance, everything in moderation.