A Valley Girl Who Beat Novel Odds

Established novelist Mary Gordon was a guest on the show. So was critic and biographer James Atlas. Then there was first-time novelist Jane Vandenburgh.

“I pronounced myself a Valley girl,” Vandenburgh says with a grin.

Vandenburgh, who grew up in Northridge, is talking about her performance the week before on the very highbrow PBS series, “Bookmark.” She was there plugging her first novel, “Failure to Zigzag” (North Point Press: $16.95), a darkly funny mother-daughter story set in Southern California in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

The appearance on the show, which is hosted by literary heavyweight Lewis Lapham and is taped in New York, was heady stuff for an author whose first novel about Southern California was rejected by every publisher she approached and whose book was finally, miraculously plucked from a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts by an editor who not only looked at it, but liked it.

Vandenburgh, who lives now in Oakland, is huddled over breakfast at the Hyatt Hotel at the airport. She’s laughing about the “Valley girl” crack and it’s not just because of the show’s staid tone. The whole notion is absurd. She’s 40, married to a professor who teaches James Joyce at San Francisco State, where Jane Vandenburgh earned a master’s in creative writing, and has two children, Noah, 8, and Eva, 4.

Three Years of Mailings

After five years at the typewriter, between editing jobs and raising her children, Vandenburgh had spent another three years sending her manuscript to New York publishers and agents. Although she’d once worked as an editor at Chronicle Books and had contacts in publishing, when it came time to show agents her novel she decided not to use an agent in her approaches to publishers. “I wanted someone to take it for the love of the book.”

A commendable idea, but it didn’t work. “I had 23 rejections of this novel,” Vandenburgh says, shaking her head. Publishers weren’t interested because she didn’t have an agent and only two published short stories to her credit. Agents weren’t interested because she was an unknown writer.

But they were also turned off by Vandenburgh’s unsentimental treatment of her schizophrenic mother character, Katrinka. “They’d say, ‘not for us,’ ” recalls Vandenburgh, who admits she finds her character “vulgar” and a terrible mother.

Finally, Vandenburgh submitted the manuscript to North Point, the prestigious small literary press in Berkeley. And though it languished there in the pile for six months, when editor Kate Moses picked it out and read it she immediately fell in love with it.

Vandenburgh figures the chances of her manuscript being accepted there were “1 in 32,000.” And the fact that it was still seems to astound her. “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in North Point.”

It’s a version that Lisa Ross, subsidiary rights director at North Point, does not dispute. “What is clear about this book is it seems somehow blessed, in that it’s beating the odds in publishing. The odds for an unagented manuscript to be read and accepted are so extraordinarily low that just its publication is a small miracle.

Strong Characters

“It actually became a cause celebre in-house,” Ross says. “The characters are so strong and the language is so fun and unusual, everyone was speaking like Katrinka. It was a book that everybody felt special about.”

Though it’s too soon to tell, Ross believes the novel has the potential to be a strong seller. Avon has already set a floor for the paperback rights at $30,000, and 12 houses are in the bidding. Beyond that, “it’s being very well-reviewed,” Ross says. “Jane is appearing on ‘Bookmark,’ and for them to focus on a first novel is very unusual. Also, there’s a lot of movie interest. We have two option offers, and I think we’ll be receiving more. It’s very much a word-of-mouth book as well. People read it and are so enthusiastic they tell all their friends about it. So that’s a good sign for the book as well.”

For her part, Vandenburgh feels vindicated--by the publication, some favorable reviews, a positive response from readers, the movie offers. (Bette Midler is interested, but Vandenburgh would like to see Tracey Ullman play Katrinka.)

“People seem to like Katrinka,” she says, sounding somewhat surprised. “They don’t say, she’s a bad woman, a bad mother. I think we all have our Katrinka-esque days, especially those of us who are mothers and aspire to some kind of artistic career.”

If you crossed Lucy Ricardo with Blanche Dubois, she’d come out acting pretty much like Katrinka. She’s an alcoholic and a ventriloquist, and she talks loudly in public and calls her auditory hallucinations “Space Radio.” Her idea of cuisine is a loaf of French bread stuffed with an ear of corn and drowned in canned peaches or a mayonnaise and olive sandwich. Her idea of housework is to pile all the laundry in the sink and let it ferment.

Survival Attempts

The story basically revolves around her daughter Charlotte’s efforts to survive this. And, for that matter, to survive the repressive rantings of her equally nutty maternal grandparents, Lionel and Winnie, with whom she lives when Katrinka’s locked up in Camarillo State Hospital.

Vandenburgh’s own childhood was more like “Father Knows Best” meets “The Brady Bunch.” A fourth-generation Californian, and one of eight children, Vandenburgh comes from a family of “staid, pretentious Republicans.” (Who aren’t all that different from her characters Winnie and Lionel, she notes wryly.) Her mother was a housewife, her father an executive with Lockheed, and most of her relatives lived in Orange, Glendale and Redondo Beach--places that also figure prominently in her book.

From Vivid Memories

Her vivid memories of growing up here and her interest in California history led her to write about Southern California. Lionel, for instance, a former successful banker who lost everything in the ’29 crash, is obsessed with Bank of America founder A. P. Giannini. He lies on the couch all day, reading and rereading the same Charles Dickens books, going to the phone “believing it might be some powerful banker--A. P. Giannini? . . . who was calling him home.”

There’s also a strong indication that this rock-ribbed Republican, this teetotaler who harangues Charlotte about the dangers of “drink,” may be a child molester. It’s all part of Vandenburgh’s take on sinister California. “I believe a lot of scoundrels ended up here,” she says, “people who were far removed from the structures of a more extended family. Did Katrinka really go to bed with her father? I don’t know. But I think that typically does happen when the family is shorn away. Lionel and Winnie don’t work, they don’t go out, so there’s no one to make them face up to what they’re doing.”

Interest in Ventriloquism

Katrinka did not arise out of Vandenburgh’s own experience, but from an interest in writing about a ventriloquist. But she was also inspired by her view of the “downside” of Lucy Ricardo.

Of Lucy and similar Lucille Ball roles, Vandenburgh recalls, “We were supposed to think she was very funny. I remember sitting in the theater as a kid, seeing her in this movie ‘The Long Long Trailer,’ with this trailer swinging out all over the road, and it was awful. It was sort of a metaphor for housekeeping, trying to be the good 1950s housewife.”

A more recent inspiration, she said, is all the adults her age who constantly complain about their parents. Practically everyone in Berkeley is in either AA or Al-Anon, she groans, and it’s “all this sort of whining,” and, taking the line from a Woody Allen movie, she’d like to tell them “Just grow up!” That’s one reason she wanted to write about schizophrenia: to show the “monumental hurdles in each child’s life.”

Not surprisingly, “dealing with these characters” made it a tough book to write, “even though I have a feeling Charlotte is going to make it.”

Vandenburgh strongly believed in Katrinka when everyone else didn’t. Everyone, that is, except her husband, who thought the book was hilarious, and a friend who’d take her out to lunch every time she rewrote the book. And it was that faith that kept her going.

Vandenburgh has completed the second draft of her second novel called “The Physics of Sunset.” It’s about an architect in Berkeley. In the meantime, she’s savoring the success of Katrinka.

“I’m so delighted people think this comic monster is funny. It makes me feel other people out there have my same sick sense of humor.”