Failure to zigzag :a novel

by Jane Vandenburgh

Finally back in print, Jane Vandenburgh's "brilliant debut-startlingly idiosyncratic, intelligent, funny, and painfully moving"-Publishers Weekly It's southern California in the early Sixties, and Charlotte is a teenager, which is bad enough. She also has strange grandparents, with whom she lives, a schizophrenic ventriloquist alcoholic mother who appears and disappears regularly from her life, and only vague information about the father who died before Charlotte was born. With so much craziness in the family, Charlotte figures, whether it's "nature" or "nurture," she's doomed. In Failure to Zigzag, Jane Vandenburgh gracefully zigzags between hilarity and sorrow as she recounts Charlotte's attempts to grow up and to practice "sanity as a form of revenge."

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Jane Vandenburgh is a fifth-generation Californian, who says, “My writing concerns itself with place — both temporal and geographic — and how place entwines with personal history. I’m interested in what’s its been to be a Westerner and a female and a member of Generation Huge, the 77 million who came of age just as the Civil Rights and antiwar movements were causing the culture of the U.S. to drastically change.”

She has taught literature and writing at U.C. Davis, at Georgetown and at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, and has been a Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary’s in Moraga, California.

Married and the mother of two children, she is also the author of the novels, Failure to Zigzag and The Physics of Sunset, the nonfiction book, The Architecture of the Novel, and the memoirs, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, and most recently, The Wrong Dog Dream. She lives in Point Richmond, California.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author's first book published by North Point Press in 1989. According to then publisher/now husband this was one of two manucripts that came in "over the transom" (unsolicited) which he published (the other was "Ghost Dance" by Carole Maso now a Professor at Brown in Providence RI). Both were first time authors and made a significant splash with the arrival of their first novels. "Failure To Zigzag" is a thinly veiled story of growing up in a surreal family situation, a story that she fully reveals in her memoir "A Pocket History Of Sex In The Twentieth Century" published in 2009.

[Jana Phoenix · Rating 1 out of 5]

how can i explain to you how awful this book is? it's not poorly written, but if you have any sort of proclivity towards mental illness, it will push you further towards it... i feel like i need to wash my brain after reading this. i had to skip past a good portion of the mother's wheeling and rambling.

basically, if you had a narcissist parent or survived a childhood abuse, or struggle with your own mental issues, this book is triggering as hell. do not recommend.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

xxx

[Victoria Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so glad I read this book. Excellent.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great writing, but the story's structure is so convoluted, with flashbacks within flashbacks and zero plot.

[Loren Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific tale of growing up in California