Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

I wanted an insider's perspective on insanity. This was not the insanity I was looking for, but there were useful insights.

Susanna is eighteen, and her life is not coming together. There are so many things she does not want to do, like go to college or keep a job or follow the rules. She changed her mind part-way through a suicide attempt, but a doctor conveniently provides a different sort of "ultimate no," sending her to McLean Hospital. Away from the world, unfree but protected, Susanna can think about how it is to think like she does. Surrounded by broken psyches, she prods the edges of her own fracture, sometimes jagged, sometimes unsatisfyingly blunt.

In the film version, Susanna reads aloud the description of "borderline personality disorder." Reaction:

Susanna: Well that's me.
Lisa: That's everybody.

And that is what a lot of it comes to. Susanna Kaysen did not see tigers or think the president is plotting to kill her. She was a somewhat exaggerated teenager: angst, directionlessness, identity issues, acting out. Most of my peers went to college for that. She went to an asylum.

Ms. Kaysen keeps commenting on the nebulous border of sanity. She says people that worry they are next, that there is so little distance between normal behavior and the kind that gets you locked up. Families pay for a daughter to be institutionalized to prove that they are not insane. She is the crazy one. Or they stop paying to prove that they are not insane. She is not crazy, so we must not be. People need to prove to themselves that insanity is the other, someone else's problem.

And then she drifts back into some real insanity. One girl collects chicken carcasses as a measuring stick towards the time she leaves the asylum. One girl doused herself with gasoline and burned away all her problems. Ms. Kaysen describes the thinking process that gets fixated on a thought and must keep exploring it, and the time Susanna bites open her hand in an attempt to prove to herself that she has bones under the skin.

I pause to note that I am trying to refer to the author as "Ms. Kaysen" and the character as "Susanna." It is a memoir, so they are the same person, but the author has several decades of distance from the institutionalized girl. Besides, in terms of unreliable narrators, how much better can you do than someone in an asylum? How about trying to reconstruct that perspective twenty-plus years later, writing about herself for others to read?

You may have seen the film. I am impressed that they pulled a linear narrative from this book, granted with rather significant changes. Compress the story here, add a character there, rearrange some events, mix in some drama...

The book is not linear. It is a series of vignettes, of episodes in the life or of ruminations that extend over months. This is the story of Daisy, and what her problem was, and how she died. Daisy is still with us next chapter, when we talk about what the nurses were like.

Some of this is memory. Think back twenty years and the story is not linear. There was this one time... and then this other time... and this is where Bill ended up... and throughout my childhood I always thought...

Some of this is insanity. It is institutional life. Why would her perception of events flow in a straight line? And when the setting is the same, day in and day out, does it really matter whether Daisy had left yet, or whether it was the third of fourth time that Lisa ran away? It may as well be a show in the TV room, where life resets every week for another story, and you only see changes when you can see the entire season.

Some of this is just good storytelling. It works.

So we have our little stories. The rating could rise to a 3.5 upon further reflection, since parts may be worth coming back to. Or maybe you walk away, with some of the value coming from the cascade of sensations that only resolve into a linear tale with reflection and work. Do you want a moment in the stream or the feeling of having swum through it?

Amazon link
the movie

PS -- I was disappointed to learn that the bit about the Oz books was invented for the film version. One of the characters is to have been devoted to L. Frank Baum and the books (not the movie). It is such a perfect image to have the girl in the asylum, escaping to a world where little girls are all princesses who are loved and who overcome tyrants through innocence and friendship.

Then again, quite a few things changed. Lisa gets a happier ending, but Polly gets stuck with her ending in the first chapter inside McLean. Didn't the climax seem forced in the movie? The tunnels appear in the book, but nothing like that scene.

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

More people are familiar with Wicked as a musical than a book. The musical features songs celebrating the death of the protagonist, foreshadowing her life in ironically hopeful lilts, showing her early oppression at the hands of her peers, mourning her failures in romance, and swearing off all goodness after the death of everyone she loves. Other characters get songs about how thinking is pointless because life is pointless and about how unsatisfying life is even if you get everything you ever wanted. The book is much darker.

"The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," so you already know a bit of this story. As a member of the English-speaking world, you are expected to be familiar with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, although you probably know the movie rather than having read L. Frank Baum. Wicked hews more to the books than the film while mostly carving its own territory.

As for the story you know, Dorothy drops in at the beginning of the last section of the book. We start just before the birth of a green-skinned girl under auspicious omens, and we make our way towards death.

Elphaba is the witch's name, and her story is not a fairy tale. It begins in squalor and degradation, it visits cruelty and depravity, and it spends much time in desperation and despair. Okay, that is what fairy tales are like, but not the cutesy versions we get these days.

While we spend most of our time around Elphaba, less than half the book is from her perspective. We spend time with her friends, family, and lover, but we only see things through her eyes once they have gone sufficiently far downhill. In some ways, that is a shame, since the die has already been cast. She thinks at some moments that she could turn back from her path, but the story carries her through. We see the events that lead to her becoming the witch, but not through her eyes.

Her story might be best taken as the frustration of hope and idealism. Both lead to suffering and/or death, although there are other paths. Elphaba has her causes. They fail. She has her dreams. She wakes. You make bad decisions and you suffer; you make good decisions and things go badly; and then you fall down.

It's a tragedy. It's a Greek tragedy.

It really is. Her birth is attended by all the appropriate foreshadowing. She is gifted with will and charisma and cursed with deformity and hamartia. Her end was fated before the first page, so it is just a matter of seeing how she gets there.

The book rebels against this at times. The dwarf says that the future is yet unwritten, and the Elephant tells Elphaba she can choose her destiny. The same dwarf guides events through the time dragon, and shadowy recurring characters help keep events from running off the rails.

Much remains in shadow, which is one of the reasons the book bears repeat reading. Much is left implied rather than stated. Story threads are taken most of the way before becoming lost in the weave or severed by Atropos. Elphaba avoids some subjects and fails to resolve others. Feel free to debate how much is left standing behind the curtain and how much was never thought through at all; obscurity is not always profundity. At the very least, there is much material to work with.

If you have seen the musical, you might expect a neater story. The pieces are tied together on stage. The threads here are loose and often incomplete. If a character is no longer needed for the story, s/he fades, and you do not find out what happens to every named character. The ones with the good sense to stay out of epics and tragedies seem to live small, content lives.

If only the witch had more tools to work with. Unlike the musical, she is not much of a witch. She has little to no magic to speak of. She has a bit of natural science, a way with animals, and a few borrowed magical tools. She is very human, if green and lonely.

I should say at some point that the book is well written. You are not being bludgeoned or tortured. You can take this as a catharsis, or you can just follow the story. The characters, though often sketched, are drawn well. You care about them to the extent that you should. The callousness and cruelty has an impact but will not scar you.

There are no whole characters. There are many broken people. You see enough to understand how many of them act, and a bit of why, but as in life their full depths remain hidden. This works.

I have cited other authors for failing in all these things that Mr. Maguire does well. They cover everything with dirt, or spend too much time on feces as a symbol, or they just have shallow characters (too many to link there). Another of our four-star books successfully flirts with the human darkness that Mr. Maguire embraces.

He probably has an excess of castration, a symbol you could explore. It starts on the first page, and there are several mentions that something is odd about Elphaba below the waist. Castration is even a late-game sign of the protection of the innocent. I worry about how Mr. Maguire would show the rescue of Ozma; if you do not know where she is hidden, I will not spoil that book. I am inspired to read more of L. Frank Baum; I am told the series gets pretty dark by the end, which fits here.

The character of Shell is another oddity of the book, to my mind. He is an entirely new character with no reference in any L. Frank Baum that I have read, a brother to the Witch. He is mentioned frequently, but he only appears once. He is the family member who got away, the one without deformity or suffering in the tale. He is a spot of normalcy, conspicuous because of his absence. Maybe he meets Liir in the sequel.

There is more to say, there is much more, but as ever I have said quite a bit already. The book gets a four because it reads well and there is much worth considering a second time. Tragedy is not for everyone, but this is a good one, much more approachable in our day than Sophocles.

Also, get the soundtrack for the musical. That is definitely a four, worth listening to frequently. Dancing through life...

Amazon link
Author's web page
See Wicked on stage
The book that started it all
The movie that kept it going
The sequel that freaked people out, but is fair to the books

Read at least the opening of The Wizard of Oz, by the way. Even in the book, Kansas is set in black and white. The film nails it.

Faeries' Landing: Volume 1 by You Hyun

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

That was surprisingly good. Maybe my expectations have been lowered by recent manga, but I liked this. It is not great literature, but it is a fun little read.

Faeries' Landing is basically Oh! My Goddess! with more humor and a down-to-earth feel. Boy meets girl, girl is a magical fairy princess, romantic hijinx ensue.

This is a Korean manga. It feels kind of weird to have Korean titles from TokyoPop, but you go to print with the publisher/distributor you have. Let's note that this is a Korean book from a Japanese publisher translated for an English (language) audience, so quite a bit has probably been lost in translation. As mentioned at the end of the volume, this is inspired by a traditional folktale, but it is one that most Americans will not have heard of, so they were rather free about translating "for intent." The original title refers to angels not faeries, a traditional character has been translated into Robin Goodfellow, the faeries are from Avalon, and they are led by Charon (who is not a hooded boatman). I have no idea how much silliness is caused by the author and how much by translators along the way, but I worked on the assumption that the names were purely decorative rather than meaningful.

I have little to say about the plot. It is a standard manga plot, in which a super-powered girl is inexplicably drawn to some young lad, though in this case there is a hint of backstory as to why. She makes his life more dynamic, with magical misadventures and romantic entanglements. In this case, the lad is already cursed with 108 evil affinities, so he is fated for horrible things to happen in his love life. This is convenient for a running series.

Ryang, the lad, is slightly different from most comics where everyone swoons over our hero. He is not a milquetoast teenage Japanese loser, possibly with unrecognized magical powers; he is a rebellious teenage Korean loser, with no special interests. He is a minor miscreant, although that seems to be more from bearing and intent rather than engaging in much juvenile delinquency. Other than that difference in tone, he is your standard manga hero, much put upon by women he alternate desires and scorns. He also has a headband.

Fanta, the titular faerie, is also a stock character, the super-powered girl who is nominally a servant to the hero but usually drives the plot. She is the genie from the bottle. Cute, otherwordly, etc.

The storytelling is lighthearted and quick. A great virtue of it is the side comments and footnotes. There are amusing comments from the author, world information, notes, and things characters say under their breath. These are enjoyable, like Douglas Adams's digressions (only less so).

The art is good. Ms. Hyun seems more interested in the female cast (and the male characters who are based on females, like the faeries), in that they have better and more interesting art. There is an attention to detail in face lines and hair. The way she draws clothing is notable in its care and accuracy. Many artists give people a standard uniform that rarely changes, and they like form-fitting clothing because they are used to drawing human bodies rather than cloth. Ms. Hyun has the characters change clothes, so she shows each in a variety of outfits, along with the occasional page where she dresses them up as her favorite video game characters. Clothing hangs and folds, with wrinkles and seams. There is something very right about how she draws a shirt hanging loosely, as opposed to clothing that seems to be an afterthought. It lacks the perfect uniformity of clothing that has inhumanly clean lines (and is easier to draw). They really are wearing clothing.

So you have a standard plot, light-hearted and quick, with good art that takes special efforts to draw outfits well. This volume is nothing terribly special, but it is a quick and enjoyable read. It is not something you must read before you die, but it is worthwhile.

Amazon link