Rich, famous and oh, so sick

Is mental illness funny? Suzanne Vale, the heroine of actress Carrie Fisher’s fourth Hollywood novel, says it had better be. Having survived drug abuse and rehab in Fisher’s debut, “Postcards From the Edge,” Suzanne rides the dizzying ups and terrifying downs of bipolar disorder in “The Best Awful,” emerging to crack jokes at benefits and otherwise comfort the similarly afflicted: “She glowed in their dark. The dark of people who had been sucked into their own shadowed experience. Suzanne spoke their language, knew their secret handshake. And one mess to another, they’d chew the fat....”

Given her history with controlled substances, it’s no surprise that Suzanne brings disaster on herself. Her studio executive husband, Leland, has turned out to be gay and left her for a man, ending what she had thought was a happy marriage. She wants to find someone to replace him. But she is taking medication for her manic-depression -- not that she quite believes the diagnosis, for how can one’s liveliest, wittiest self be a disease? -- and feels dulled and diminished, deprived of her full seductive powers. Her solution is to ease off the meds and unleash her alter ego, Lucrezia (as in Borgia). “What Suzanne couldn’t and wouldn’t do, her Lucrezia did for her, functioning ... without morals, qualms, or compunctions, rather with an unbridled glee.... Especially when it came to men, shopping, traveling, outbursts of sudden generosity, and taking drugs.”

Suzanne promises herself to keep Lucrezia under control, so as not to endanger her job as a talk show hostess or her relationship with her 6-year-old daughter, Honey. At first all goes well. After the funeral of Jack Burroughs, the slimy producer who bedded her in “Postcards,” Suzanne couples with a megastar, aging satyr Dean Bradbury, and follows up with a boy toy, an Eastern European hunk she nicknames Thor. She shines, even sparkles, at dinner parties. So what if Lucrezia soon escapes all restraints? So what if Suzanne goes sleepless for six days and finds herself high on OxyContin, Rush Limbaugh’s painkiller of choice, and headed for Tijuana with an ex-con tattoo artist? “Bliss beat at the back of her eyelids with both of its beautiful fists.”

The manic phase ends abruptly in a bout of physical and spiritual nausea in a restroom south of the border. Then the depression kicks in. “Each day she was half the person she’d been the day before, sliding more and more in spectrum and scope and lower and lower in her own esteem.” Psychotic episodes follow -- characters in old movies seem to talk to Suzanne -- and she lands in a mental hospital, Shady Lanes (“Shaky Brains” to its inmates). She struggles to regain sanity with the help of her movie star mom, Doris; her best gal pal, Lucy; her male shoulder-to-lean-on, Craig; and even Leland.

Fisher’s novels deserve their popularity. Her intelligence and humor -- sometimes wicked, sometimes winningly self-deprecating -- are matched by a no-nonsense quality: We feel that across the divides of fame and wealth, she’s leveling with us. Suzanne sometimes loses her grip on reality and Fisher’s prose -- third-person narration with the subjective snap of the first person -- sometimes tries too hard to amuse. But her account of the bipolar ordeal rings fundamentally true.

Of course, it’s Fisher’s status as second-generation Hollywood royalty that makes her writing unusual and interesting. Unlike others who chronicle that milieu -- think of Jackie Collins -- she isn’t out to shock or impress. She neither gloats nor apologizes. She simply writes about what she knows. Of Suzanne, she says: “She’d always had what she knew were considered ‘glamorous’ jobs, when all she’d ever really done was go helplessly into the family business.”

Now and then we realize that Suzanne -- perhaps like her creator -- doesn’t know a whole lot about how the rest of us live. Recuperating at a beach house in Santa Barbara, she listens to passing trains and thinks the main passenger rail route “from Seattle to San Diego” has “unobstructed views of the ocean almost all the way.” No, it doesn’t, as folks who ride trains could tell her. This is trivial, but it matters because Suzanne’s life is so cushioned that the novel loses some of its potential drama. The threat to her health is real, but the other dreaded consequences of her flipping out prove not to be in play after all. Her friends are loyal, her insurance is deep-pocketed and tabloid exposure enhances rather than destroys her TV career. For most of the mentally ill, it’s likely to be a different story. *