Valley Girl

Laurie Fox is a fine writer in the making, and her first novel, about a family torn apart by mental illness, is an uneven accomplishment.

“My Sister from the Black Lagoon” is the story of the Person family, who live in the San Fernando Valley during the 1950s and ‘60s. Father Burton works as a TV network accountant on shows like “Rawhide” and “Shingdig.” He’s overweight, clueless and insensitive. Julia, who looks like Rita Hayworth, is the long-suffering stay-at-home mom. Narrator Lorna is an adolescent aspiring writer and an actress possessed of a febrile imagination. Then there is Lorna’s sister, Lonnie, who suffers from a mysterious form of mental illness. Family life boils down to the “Lonnie show,” Lorna complains, feeling lost in the shuffle.

Lonnie drools, spits and laughs menacingly, like the characters in the cartoons and monster movies that she adores. She threatens her family with gory fates when they fail to understand her--about 100% of the time. In one sequence, Lonnie won’t eat her toast because it has “sharp edges.” Burton doesn’t see her madness, just a kid who won’t eat. A screaming match follows and Lonnie cries out: “I’ll kill ya, . . . I swear I’ll get you and drain your blood on the pavement.”

As she grows up, Lonnie develops into a difficult creature with no friends or contacts in the world other than her family, which is splitting up just as Lorna goes off to college. Burton and Julia divorce. Both parents want to be free of Lonnie, who is tucked away in an institution for the rest of her days. Lorna pays a visit to her sister at her group home, where Lonnie faces “a punishing landscape of boring days and interminable years.” Lorna realizes that she must leave Lonnie to face life.

In this book, which is described as “a novel of my life,” Fox refers to some familiar markers--the nearby studios, houses with cottage cheese ceilings, scrubby rattlesnake hillsides behind her Tarzana home--but she never conveys any of the Valley’s atmosphere. A careful writer, Fox simply doesn’t get a handle on the rich weirdness of the San Fernando Valley. The novel of the sun-bleached ultimate suburb remains to be written.