Customer Reviews

The Best Awful: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said something along the lines of, "Agony, sure I have agony. But everybody has agony. The difference is that I take mine home and try to make it sing."

From Carrie Fisher, we get an aria, and quite a successful one at that. I was expecting to be entertained by The Best Awful, and I was, yet the novel is far more satisfying than Hollywood fluff. Whatever insights the author has earned through her turbulent/famous/funny life have given her depth and substance as an author. Fisher offers up sharp dialogue (not just a string of one-liners), a vivid but unpreachy view of mental health and its absence, and characters so real that I expected to see them sitting next to me on the sofa.

Wow.

"The Best Awful" is wonderful, a compelling work whose humor belies a heartrending truth. In dealing with mental illness, Fisher doesn't sanitize insanity, but gives us a hard, unsparing look at what happens when a mind is lost, or rather, when it's found on an out-of-this-world plane. She takes us along a harrowing trip, harnessed to fast, furious, and funny prose. The strange thing is, it's a curl-up-under-the-covers read, a safe haven, where not only do you appreciate your own boring "normalcy," you develop a compassion you never knew you had. While Suzanne Vale's pain is so real, her rantings so over-the-detailed-top, it's her humanity that's still front and center -- an amoral ethicist pontificating on what it means to live a large life made larger by turning small. You have to read it to get that line! A beautifully done job. Fisher is a celebrity who truly deserves to be celebrated. And no, I'm not a friend, and until now, I wasn't a thumbs-up-to-the-sky fan.

I have read all four of Carrie Fisher's novels, and this one is my second favorite, after the charming, hilarious "Delusions of Grandma." This novel includes many colorful central and secondary characters, but none as vibrant as Suzanne Vale, the bipolar heroine.

"The Best Awful" takes the reader on a roller-coster ride from the stability of everyday "sane" life through the perils of meltdown...and all the way to the loony bin and out again. Laced with Fisher's winning humor and alarming literacy, this novel is a winner from beginning to end. The ride will keep you laughing and leave you a little sad, but ultimately "The Best Awful" serves as a satifying read.

THE BEST AWFUL is Carrie Fisher's autobiographical sequel to POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE. Suzanne Vale, a medium-famous actress and daughter of the indomitable Doris, is a single mother reeling from being left by her husband Leland, who is gay. The book chronicles Suzanne's struggles with manic depression and some fairly bold drug use, told with the sense of humor of someone who realizes how silly the "business of show" is.
Events don't occur so much as coalesce around Suzanne, who narrates in a addled stream of consciousness style. A disatrous drug fueled trip to Tijuana and a stay in a mental hospital are harrowingly sketched and are the main set pieces of the book. I enjoyed seeing Suzanne through to a slightly ambiguous but hopeful ending, in which she forms a slightly different kind of family. Some of the secondary characters are thin and there's nothing new in the sending up of Hollywood life, but THE BEST AWFUL is a survivor's story by someone who has earned the right to tell it.

If you think Carrie Fisher is just an actress turned writer, The Best Awful will convince you she's quite a marvelous novelist. I can't remember a book with a more harrowing and hilarious depiction of the inside of a bipolar mind, and leavened as it is with comic gunfire and celebrity mayhem, it's more affecting in the end than "Girl, Interrupted."

Suzanne Vale who we were first introduced to in "Postcards from the Edge" returns long enough to veer off the edge of sanity and welcome us to her breakdown. Her husband has left her for another man, her fiercely intelligent daughter is more grown up than she is, and her life keeps sputtering forward while beginning to careen wildly out of control. The book, which is filled with Fishers signature wit and dry humor, really takes flight once her illness fully manifests itself. LIke driving past an accident I found myself unable to look away as one folly built on another. Knowing how the character parallels Fishers own life, I found myself reading the book wondering what was real and what was not. A (strange to say) entertaining read.

The main character is bipolar, with a short attention span when manic. I felt this book was the same way. It is entertaining and with many colorful characters, Suzanne Vale (narrator and protagonist) is very witty and has a fantastic way with words. But the events in this book do not flow naturally, instead there seems to be one disconnected crisis after another, as if a stand-up comic ran out of material but kept going on and on until she filled 270 pages. Even the ending seems an unrealistic, forced resolution. But it does offer insights into bipolar disorder, celebrity life, and the realities of a mental institution. It is hilarious writing and has stretches (the last 100 pages) where excitement built up. But with Ms. Fisher's obvious talent, it could have been so much better.

I found this lastest book by Fischer particularly enlightening. I was recently diagnosed with bi-polar II. After all of the medical information I've received, coupled with anecdotal stories, I found this to be an accurate and refreshingly funny insight into our world of "crazy". I truly understand "The Best Awful" as I reflect upon my life. This is also helpful for family members and friends who may have some trouble understanding or dealing with the diagnosis...they will see parts they can relate to, as the main character has frustrated friends trying to "piece" her back together! "Bravo" for Fischer and her courage with this subject.

if you like books like my fractured life and postcards from edge you'll think it's very good.

Postcards From The Edge defined its time, and now after an elegant absence Ms. Fisher once more sets pen to page to amuse the rest of us mortals. Tackling the subject of manic depression is something only teh very brave and the very eloquent would assume; luckily for readers, she is both. I believe history bears this out...and The Best Awful is a great read, as well as a wonderful quasi-rebuttal to her father's conceit of a "biography" whose name hardly bears mentioning. Eddie Fisher. Proof that there is a Goddess, and that she has smiled again upon those of us who sprang from less-than-ideal loins (although i adore and respect Debbie Reynolds - a great talent and a survivor) and survived drugs, alcohol and other various maladies to triumph. Well done, Ms. Fisher. You rock.