The Best Awful: A Novel [Paperback]

If it seems to you that I'm spewing sophomoric little plays on words in this review, it's possibly because I just finished reading ONE THOUSAND of them in this book. See, The Best Awful is the unawaited sequel to Postcards from the Edge, which surprised everyone with its witty, sarcastic, and yet touching look at the frazzled Suzanne Vale's life on the edges of Hollywood and her trying relationship to her celebrity mother (a.k.a. Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds). Not satisfied to have written her quasi-autobiography so early in her life, Fisher has returned to these characters for some personal reason that should have never been allowed to become public, no matter how en vogue little novels of fractured females have become. In this uninstallment, Vale has had a daughter and been promptly dumped not for another woman, but for a man. Oh the millennial perspective! Oh that mixed-up place called Hollywood! Of course, she reacts badly, getting off her medication and going on a drug spree that lands her in a mental institution called-get this-"Shady Lanes."

With a modicum of self-control, this plot could have been as perceptively developed as Postcards was, a possible post-me-decade second look at the world Vale inhabited back then. The fact that the book is a sequel is not what's wrong with it. What's wrong with it is that it hasn't moved on to another world, that it offers no further insight into any of its characters. Instead, you get pages (and pages and pages) of Vale's self-involved, mania-induced blithering soliloquy, unedited. Pages. It's one thing to attempt to show what a mind goes through as it breaks down, and it's another thing to make a novel out of it. Unless you're impressed by tenth-grade punning such as "come hell or high daughter" or "no room at the bin," Vale's breakdown has nothing to offer other than an unsavory look at a world we saw (better) in Postcards. Nothing wrong with following around a character who neglects her daughter and abuses her friends if I care for her for some reason, because she's witty, or tortured, or a vehicle for some truth about the human soul the author has uncovered. But, if she's none of these, she's really just a chatty seatmate on a bus to whom not even the other characters in the book want to listen.

In terms of it being a look into the bipolar mind, well, sure, if that's what you want, a look. But chances are the average reader is not going to care much for what she sees there, because the bipolar mind suffers from the same problems the novel does: it is neither entertaining nor a revelation of anything. It is simply a nonsensical, painful collection of broken thoughts that don't even make sense to the thinker. Or the reader.