All This and Oprah Too? ‘Oleander’s’ Powerful Prose

It occurs a little more than midway through Astrid Magnussen’s jagged journey. One foot in hope, the other in despair, she utters the words, partly for herself, partly for the woman who embodies her latest best chance, trembling at the brink: “Anything can happen.”

Astrid, Janet Fitch’s steely-eyed survivor in the author’s long poem of a novel, “White Oleander” (Little, Brown, 1999), has glimpsed too much; has too often stood too close to the brink, looking over the sheer drop: She knows how easily it could go either way.

But when Fitch tapped out those words on her keyboard dozens of months back, she wasn’t thinking about how resonant or applicable they might be.

Not that Fitch was contemplating the worst, by any stretch of the imagination. She was instead merely modest in her aspirations. A mother and child pas de deux, “White Oleander” winds the reader through the labyrinth of identity--self-imposed, otherwise assigned--using L.A.’s monolithic foster-care system as the proving ground through which Astrid must travel. It was to be Fitch’s labor of love, a work of literary fiction that she figured would play to a very small room.

“To have ‘Oleander’ published,” she says, “that was all I ever wanted.”

That was until Oprah called.

Soon after the talk show host’s on-air raves a month or so later in May, with Winfrey effusively dubbing the author’s first novel “liquid poetry” as she added it to her high-profile Book Club list, Fitch’s “little book” suddenly shot onto the top five of newspaper bestseller lists across the country (including those of the Washington Post, USA Today, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times).

“I mean it’s weird when you see your book at Brentano’s or on the shelves at Costco!” Fitch says.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, wrapped up in the mini-whirlwind that has become Fitch’s post-Oprah life--and it’s easy to, she will tell you--it’s important to say that her powerful little book had early on turned heads of the top brass at Little, Brown.

“There was an overwhelming response to it,” says Michael Pietsch, editor in chief at the publishing house. “Most everyone on the publishing board thought it was one of the best first novels we’d seen in a long time. So we did a huge number of advance editions, got the word-of-mouth going. We knew we had a powerfully written novel and were doing all we could to let the rest of the world see that too.”

Before the recent Cinderella turn of events, Fitch had been dutifully following the noble creative writer’s path. She did workshops. Got published in a collection of respected literary journals. And was pleasantly surprised by publication of a children’s novel (the outgrowth of a short story), “Kicks,” (Clarion) in 1995. But all the while she’d been walking around with the seeds of this novel buried deep. It was poet-journal editor Jim Krusoe’s criticism--”Good story, but what’s unique about your sentences?”--that spurred her to chip at her writing. A series of intensive workshops with one of L.A.’s best-known prose lyricists, Kate Braverman, helped Fitch piece together a singular voice, a reverberating prose style.

“Literary fiction has always been my thing,” Fitch says. “Exactly this kind of literary fiction. Things that are real, that really give you the edge and texture of this city.”

Fitch, 43, a third-generation Angeleno who lives along one of Silver Lake’s famously improbable inclines with her husband, Steve Strauss, and daughter Allison, 9, defines this new pace and attention in a word: “surreal.”

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It’s a few days after the Oprah taping in Chicago (the show aired last week) when she sits down to lunch at a sunny Los Feliz eatery sipping iced tea. Today, she’s already done two phone interviews (“I just got call waiting”) and there are more tomorrow before she’s off on another plane to another city.

It’s easy to bask in the glow of Fitch’s moment--her yearbook smile, her glowing sincerity, she reminds you of the girl you passed notes to in math.

“The whole thing it’s like a dream,” says Fitch, “Like you’re talking to Abe Lincoln and a dancing dog, and you’re going: ‘OK, I can handle that . . .’ When I . . . saw [Oprah] handing the book out to these . . . women, I was just screaming my head off! I had to go pick up my kid that day, y’know, the carpool, because you have to, Oprah or not,” recalls Fitch, barely coming up for air. “And we get back to the house and my daughter says, ‘Oh the dog got to the pillow,’ because there was all this shreddy stuff all over the floor. I had to admit that it wasn’t the dog.”

Told in an intoxicating waltz-paced prose, “Oleander” is the story of an adolescent girl standing at the border of puberty, living with her arrestingly beautiful poet-mother Ingrid. No mere woman, rather a force of nature, Ingrid lives her life by a series of strict, self-imposed rules. That is until she breaks one. The price? Their life together as mother and child, merely shards.

“With Ingrid,” says Fitch recalling her process, “I asked myself what does it mean to have aesthetics as your primary concern? So I wrote a story with her as the protagonist. I thought she was, in a very dark way, very funny. But people hated that story. They said, ‘You’ve got to give her someone to see her through.’ So I gave her a daughter. And as soon as I gave her a child, suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. It’s not funny to be the daughter of someone that narcissistic. It becomes serious immediately. So that’s how Astrid was born.”

Ingrid imprisoned, absent, Astrid is then left alone to not only make a space for herself in the world, but to try to construct some semblance of identity outside of the heavy-handed conceits of her mother.

“I had friends who were foster children,” says Fitch. “I was always aware of the possibility that your life could fall apart and terrible things could happen. You could just fall down a hole and you’d end up in this underworld where you float through like an underground river.”

And it’s that expanse through which Astrid attempts to stay afloat--the paper trails and caseworkers, the group homes and surrogate mothers, the despair and the hope. She shuffles from Tujunga to Van Nuys to Hollywood to the Fairfax district to the Eastside’s Frogtown, the rarefied and ragged tapestry that is all L.A., a spread-out humming matrix, L.A. as motherboard.

“I’m interested in L.A. as a general ongoing obsession,” says Fitch, who like many natives finds herself frustrated by the narrow scope reflected in so much of contemporary fiction’s take on L.A. “One day I looked up and down my street in Silver Lake, and I realized that there was a different universe in every house. Different economics, different values, different domestic configurations, different countries. And Astrid going into foster care gave me a chance to go from house to house and to look at all these fragments.”

Fitch set up interviews at MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte and the women’s prison in Chino with people who either were a product of the system or worked within it. Not simply gluing together fragments but understanding what the whole means is at the crux of the journey. Survival takes imagination, creativity--requires hope--all themes that circle themselves through Fitch’s tale, which ends as inscrutably as it began. Life is as unfathomable as the flower--as luminous as it is poisonous--for which the book is named.

“I’m not sure what Oprah’s readers will think of it,” says Fitch, who knows that “White Oleander” is a book that doesn’t flinch, doesn’t hedge, refuses to let up. And now the idea is, says Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch, “That we have to work even harder to make sure that the book gets paid attention to after all of this is over. To build on this for the rest of her career.”

But for Fitch, life now is as simple as this: “Like I told my family after all this happened, I’ve adopted the position that if anything should happen to me, don’t pull the plug, because truly, anything could happen. You never know what’s next.”

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Janet Fitch will read from “White Oleander” at 1 p.m. July 10 at Scribner’s Bookstore in the Glendale Galleria; and at 7 p.m. July 18 at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles.

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Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at lynell.george@latimes.com.