Janet Fitch - White Oleander

Copyright 1999 by Janet Fitch

Excerpt from Paint It Black copyright 2006 by Janet Fitch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group USA

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, April 1999

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

An excerpt of this novel was previously published in Black Warrior Review.

The interview with Janet Fitch in the reading group guide at the back of this book is excerpted from an article that first appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.

ISBN: 978-0-7595-6817-4

First eBook Edition: June 2008

WHITE OLEANDER

Quite simply, White Oleander is amazing. Its the kind of book you dont want to put down. Its full-blooded, alive, breathtaking, frightening.... This incredible novel is the story of what it is to be extraordinary women.

Rohana Chomick, Tampa Tribune-Times

White Oleander is likely the best debut this reviewer has ever read.... Heartbreaking, but without a trace of sentimentality, it provokes amazement.

Judith Kicinski, Library Journal (starred review)

White Oleander is just what the title promises a tale of poisonous beauty, dangerous, heady scents, an unforgettable story of a young girl growing up.... Its narrator is part poet, part seductress, part Scheherazade, part street punk.... Long after the book has ended, youll feel the hot breeze of this novel scorched in your memory, lingering in your heart.

Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

As a character, Astrid falls between the innocent lambs some imagine children to be and the great female survivors of literature: as resilient as Moll Flanders, as necessarily selfish as Thackerays Becky Sharp.

Chris Waddington, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Theres nothing ordinary about Fitchs debut. For starters, Ingrid and Astrid Magnussen are one of the most intriguing mother-daughter duos in recent fiction.... Fitchs is a fresh, exotic, full-to-bursting voice, fitfully under control but never dull. Her characters are unusual, wildly imagined.

Jocelyn McClurg, Hartford Courant

When we first came across this novel last month, we loved it and believed we had discovered the seasons best-kept secret.

Felicia Paik, Wall Street Journal

White Oleander resonates with commitment to no other master than the art of storytelling itself.

Greg Burkman, Seattle Times

Thoroughly enjoyable.... As Astrid develops into a powerful character in her own right, her desire for self-discovery and sheer will to survive drive the narrative.... Fitchs hypnotic voice offers an honest and oddly seductive vision of L.A.

Deborah Picker, LA Weekly

There may be no personal relationship more complicated than the one between a mother and her adolescent daughter.... Not surprisingly, there are also few personal relationships more difficult to write about well. Mona Simpson did it admirably in Anywhere But Here. Janet Fitch does it spectacularly in White Oleander.... Fitch keeps her vision surreal, her touch light, and her focus strong: This is a story of two particular women and the ambivalences that unite and divide them. That it will speak to anyone who ever had a mother is just a bonus.

Sara Nelson, Newsday

A dazzling debut, a triumph of voice and character.... White Oleander is the moving and complex story of Astrids journey through six foster homes across southern California, each one an unnerving snapshot of contemporary American family life. Fitchs prose is fresh and evocative.... Stunning.

Patty Housman, Bloomsbury Review

To the man from Council Bluffs

THE SANTA ANAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind. She held up her large hand and spread the fingers, let the desert dryness lick through. My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her. I wished things were back the way they had been, that Barry was still here, that the wind would stop blowing.

You should get some sleep, I offered.

I never sleep, she said.

I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. The edge of her white kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.

I rested my head on her leg. She smelled like violets. We are the wands, she said. We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

The wands, I repeated. I wanted her to know I was listening. Our tarot suit, the wands. She used to lay out the cards for me, explain the suits: wands and coins, cups and swords, but she had stopped reading them. She didnt want to know the future anymore.

We received our coloring from Norsemen, she said. Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Dont forget who you are.

I promise, I said.

Down below us in the streets of Hollywood, sirens whined and sawed along my nerves. In the Santa Anas, eucalyptus trees burst into flames like giant candles, and oilfat chaparral hillsides went up in a rush, flushing starved coyotes and deer down onto Franklin Avenue.

She lifted her face to the singed moon, bathing in its glowering beams. Ravens-eye moon.

Baby-face moon, I countered, my head on her knee.

She softly stroked my hair. Its a traitors moon.

IN THE SPRING this wound had been unimaginable, this madness, but it had lain before us, undetectable as a land mine. We didnt even know the name Barry Kolker then.

Barry. When he appeared, he was so small. Smaller than a comma, insignificant as a cough. Someone she met at a poetry reading. It was at a wine garden in Venice. As always when she read, my mother wore white, and her hair was the color of new snow against her lightly tanned skin. She stood in the shade of a massive fig tree, its leaves like hands. I sat at the table behind stacks of books I was supposed to sell after the reading, slim books published by the Blue Shoe Press of Austin, Texas. I drew the hands of the tree and the way bees swarmed over the fallen figs, eating the sun-fermented fruit and getting drunk, trying to fly and falling back down. Her voice made me drunk deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed. If youd ever heard her, you knew the power of that hypnotic voice.