Carrie Fisher: The Best Awful

            I was looking for novels structured on the experiences of an unreliable narrator, so this one popped up near the top of my list. Fisher writes brilliantly of the experiences of going off her psych meds and then having a psychotic break, then coming back around to sanity. The Best Awful allows the narrative style to be driven by the tremendous changes the main character is going through, to the point where her manic state shows up in multiple pages of breathless monologue. Once again, the structure of the novel is reflected in the finer grained structure of the writing. As the protagonist spins out of control, the language and style spin just as fast. When the protagonist is drugged and unable to bring her usual sharp wit into play, the prose goes flat and halting, limited in vocabulary as well as in color and life.

            I Capture the Castle had me thinking a lot about this exact possibility, how a writer can let the character’s changes drive the actual style of the writing. I haven’t read Flowers for Algernon in about thirty years, but I might have to study that next, since obviously that’s the epitome of this literary maneuver. I might also throw I Am the Cheese into the mix. I have absolutely vivid memories of the first time I read that book, sitting on the floor in my fifth grade English teacher’s classroom, blown away that a book could lie so well and so secretly. Are there other novels that follow this pattern? I will have to research this more and see what I can find. I’m not sure what to call “this” though! What is it? I suppose I’m more used to the writing being in general the vehicle more than the substance of storytelling itself. Help, I need terminology!

            The Best Awful performs its story as it tells it, like I Capture the Castle. The main character, Suzanne Vale, Carrie Fisher’s fictionalized stand-in, gradually loses the perspective and insight to see how terrible her decisions are and what the consequences might be. There are even times when the character successfully bats away knowledge and awareness, such as a moment when a drug dealer uses a glass paperweight with the word “MOTHER” inside it to crush pills for her to snort. Suzanne feels a flash of something that she knows she should remember, but pushes it away, riding the joy of the moment. It’s only later that she remembers her daughter’s very existence, when Suzanne’s bizarre runaway experience leaves her broke and stranded in a Tijuana bathroom where she has just vomited over everything.

            I must have read this book when it came out in 2003, but I remembered absolutely nothing except that scene. It’s Suzanne’s lowest point, even lower than when she nearly dies of an allergic reaction to prescription drugs. The shock to the character herself feels so jarring, after the happy manic burbling and the euphoric hallucinations and visions she sees. Instead of seeing glowing golden light emanating from her head, Suzanne is stuck with grim reality: she wipes up her own vomit with endless paper towels.

            I’m compelled to think about the way the changing narrative style fits with every action in the novel. Normal life only appears at the beginning and the end of the book. At the beginning, Suzanne’s daughter is the center of her world, but her own life feels stifled and marred by her divorce. The divorce colors absolutely everything, to the point where Suzanne tries to go out and do things that will make her more interesting. She stops taking her bipolar meds to let her wild, fun side out, the side she named Lucrezia, but then once she’s off her meds, the roller coaster ride begins and she has no way of regaining control—and no desire to regain control, because she’s having a blast. That ride lasts right up until that Tijuana bathroom, after which she goes back on her medications, until the allergic reaction that nearly kills her. She comes to in the hospital, where she is awake for six straight days and ends up committed to an inpatient institution. She only gradually becomes lucid enough to figure out where she is and what’s going on. When she is released, she has to work her way back into normal life, where her daughter once again becomes the center of her world.

            The structure of the novel clearly follows an out-and-back shape. I don’t know if there’s a better term for that! The normal world gets bent out of shape and then returned to some semblance of the original, but a little better, a little happier, a little more content. Neil Gaiman writes this structure in almost every novel. A character jumps out of his or her normal life and gets caught up in a bizarre world that he or she must figure out and escape, only to return to normal life changed by the experience.

            There’s no way for me to do justice to the poetry of Fisher’s writing without quoting the entire novel here. She’s able to reconstruct a person’s inner monologue and thoughts better than anyone I’ve read since Virginia Woolf. Given this beautiful structure, the out and back again psychological journey, Fisher is able to soar and riff and chatter and float. In a less structured novel, that might be infuriating, but since she follows the character’s rising and falling arc exactly, it works wonderfully well.