The story pitches and tosses, rarely losing its tension or its drama. Watching the passage of this child, this “instead-baby,” as she toils through the arduous challenges of foster care, ever in the distant shadow of her ferocious and self-absorbed mother, we feel angry, sorrowful, sympathetic and later exhausted. The two pieces are skillfully wrapped in a physical and societal toxicity, in a story told with a calm, observational tone that is buffeted, but never ruined, by the shocking things Astrid endures. The benign hemisphere envelops Astrid’s stoicism and her ability to survive, to learn and to grow through the trauma. The malignant hemisphere freights Astrid’s grueling journey, her mother’s narcissism, and the despair of the foster home environment. White Oleander has two hemispheres that sit – mostly – in equilibrium. All of which seems to make it worse, to add insult to the injury.

And her one foster mother hope – nurturing, neurotic, depressive Claire, who is ultimately a mirage of the mother Ingrid will never have – purges herself instead of the child. Astrid is shot by a jealous born-again Christian foster mother enslaved and evicted by white trash suburbanites charmed and abandoned by a high-end prostitute starved by a wealthy Argentine exile then neglected and put to work by a Russian flea-market hustler. With no control of her own passage, Astrid tumbles through a series of Californian foster homes that function as a kaleidoscopic cross section of late Twentieth Century western dysfunction.

Astrid Magnussen, the story’s narrator, is twelve years old when her narcissistic mother (and sole parent) Ingrid – a poet – is imprisoned. The episodic structure and the degraded milieu of the story borrow from the picaresque tradition. Like the beautiful but toxic Oleander plant that forms the novel’s central allegory, in this world everything is subjective and conditional, nothing is certain, and the reader’s relationship with this story is never quite in balance. For each time I rejoiced in the resilience of the human spirit, I wept in despair at its ugliness. Reading Janet Fitch’s first novel, White Oleander (White, Brown, 1999) is an emotionally shredding experience.

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