Book Review : Bright Girl Caught in a Mad World

Failure to Zigzag by Jane Vandenburgh (North Point Press: $16.95; 329 pages)

If you saw 14-year-old Charlotte and her mother, Katrinka, at the soda fountain in Montrose, you’d think they were winding up a mother-daughter shopping trip, but if you were within earshot, you’d soon realize that this was no ordinary excursion. Katrinka is loudly insisting she’s being pursued by teams of psychiatrists from Camarillo; Charlotte is desperately trying to calm her down.

After the first few sentences, it’s plain that Katrinka is no delightfully madcap mom but a woman temporarily furloughed from the mental hospital; not madcap but truly mad. From that point on, pleasure in the mordant satire and witty dialogue is edged with guilt and pity for the child who so valiantly attempts to understand and cope. “Charlotte had stopped listening. Instead, she was thinking about the nature of paranoia, that it, like the color of one’s eyes and the shape of one’s eyebrows and upper lip, might be a gene-linked trait.” In a just world, she should be worrying about the fizzies and geometry, but there’s no justice here.

Runs in the Family

During the periods when Katrinka is incarcerated, Charlotte lives with her maternal grandparents, Winnie and Lionel Ainsworth of Glendale. A short acquaintance with them can persuade you that psychiatry may have been too hasty in discounting heredity as a factor in mental illness, because Winnie and Lionel seem almost as irrational as Katrinka, though in socially more acceptable ways.

Charlotte’s father is dead, presumably drowned when the Indianapolis was sunk near the end of World War II by a Japanese torpedo. Moving under cover of darkness with its cargo of uranium, the ship failed to zigzag--standard operating procedure during wartime. That phrase not only gives the book its title but its leitmotif; “failure to zigzag” becoming the metaphor for Katrinka’s inability to accommodate to reality; for the elder Ainsworth’s fixed and rigid ideas and for the young naval officer’s inexplicable behavior. Only young Charlotte is able to zigzag in this particular sense, developing the necessary resilience as a tot.

Shock Treatment

The structure of the book is also a zigzag; opening with an extended segment delineating Charlotte’s life with her eccentric grandparents, then backtracking to 1955, when Katrinka is released from the hospital only to marry a well-meaning red-neck who optimistically installs his new bride and her child in his ramshackle Radiant Beach house. There, Katrinka attempts to play wifey, a role for which her recent experience with shock treatment has clearly not prepared her. Riotously funny, these scenes are poignantly tempered by Charlotte’s anguish.

Though we’re relieved when the bizarre marriage ends, Katrinka’s next remission in 1962 has mother and daughter taking off in an Airstream to follow a struggling circus. Temporarily able to resume her “career” as a ventriloquist, Katrinka leaves with her parents’ blessings.

A Coming-of-Age

By buying her the trailer, they hope to be finally free of their troublesome daughter and to shift their burden onto 16-year-old Charlotte’s capable shoulders. In the course of this final section, we finally learn the truth about Joseph Black, Charlotte’s father, a mystery that has haunted the novel from the beginning.

In the end, Charlotte is also free, though her liberation is more costly than any in current fiction. As affecting as it is astonishing, “Failure to Zigzag” succeeds in renewing that weary genre, the coming-of-age first novel.