Books: High Wired

There’s a point in this headlong novel at which Suzanne Vale (read author Carrie Fisher) finally somersaults into the Mount Doom of her dilemmas. This is not long after she realizes at last that going off the medication for her manic depression was a mistake. For one thing, that was what let her shoot at top speed, flinging one-liners all the way, to that place in her head where it seemed like a simply terrific idea–terrific!–to get a tattoo, cut off her hair and convert to Judaism, preferably Orthodox, though not before heading to Mexico with that muscular ex-con from the tattoo parlor. Which is how she ends up in Tijuana, knocked silly on OxyContin and slumped in a pool of her own vomit. The Best Awful (Simon & Schuster; 269 pages) can be a very funny book, but generally the laughs come hard.

What we have here is a sequel to Postcards from the Edge, Fisher’s 1987 autobiographical debut novel about the emotional perils of growing up in Hollywood as the daughter of two big names (names like, say, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds). In each book Suzanne careers gamely into crisis–a drug addiction then, a bipolar crack-up now, not unlike the one Fisher suffered in 1997. This time she also has a concerned ex-husband who has left her for a man, and a beloved little daughter who may be starting to prefer the company of Dad and his boyfriend. They do, after all, have that $5,000 remote for the TV. Plus they’re not crazy.

Which Suzanne assuredly is–state-of-the-art, all-flags-flying crazy, a condition that Fisher lays before us with the panache of a true insider. The Best Awful is not so much a novel as a hypomanic soliloquy unleashed by a woman who is “an avalanche ever gathering force.” If a pinwheel could talk, it would sound like her. Fisher’s penchant for endless wordplay can get wearisome. Make that very wearisome. All the same, who would have thought it could be so much fun to be trapped inside the head of the type of person who so radically mislays herself? Someone who decides at 2 a.m. to take a hammer to her expensive patio? At her best, the woman who played Princess Leia in Star Wars is still the last word in snappy madcaps, Bette Midler in The Bell Jar. “Suzanne thought it hilarious,” she tells us, “that there was an illness whose symptoms were spending sprees, substance abuse and sexual promiscuity. These didn’t sound like symptoms at all–just a typical weekend in Vegas.”

Ba-da-boom. In the end, of course, bipolar disorder is no joke. Suzanne goes into reverse, into the lethal subtraction of depression–first happiness goes, then feeling of any kind. When a doctor treats her with an unsuitable new prescription, she ends up in a mental hospital, the usual cuckoo’s nest of chain smokers and emotional skulduggery. There’s some light at the end of the tunnel, but the point of this book is not the destination. It’s the haywire road Suzanne takes as she drives herself crazy. Fisher can drive you crazy too. But when she pulls up and opens the door, get in. –By Richard Lacayo