Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The Ainsworths’ Good Name
Chapter 2 - Listening in the Dark
Chapter 5 - Great Expectations
Chapter 6 - Even Greater Expectations
Chapter 13 - Nescafé de Camarillo
Chapter 14 - La Vie de Gervaise
Chapter 17 - Alight with the Same Desire
Chapter 19 - In the Fire Season
Chapter 20 - A Word Turned Inside Out
Chapter 21 - A Room with a View
“Like it or not, we are part of the
crappy shit of our own families.
I mean that in the kindest way.”
—Katrinka Ainsworth in Failure to Zigzag
“Brilliant. . . . A startlingly idiosyncratic, intelligent, funny, and painfully moving novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Jane Vandenburgh’s Failure to Zigzag is a remarkable first novel. From beginning to end, it’s written with great authority—there are no false steps here, no feeble gestures toward what other people might consider good writing. The dark material is treated entirely without melodrama or sentimentality; humor, if anything, is the prevailing tone, though it is an earned, wise humor, not a wise-cracking, mocking kind. And the mother, Katrinka Ainsworth, is one of the great characters of modern American fiction.”
—Wendy Lesser, Editor, The Threepenny Review
“Rarely has a first novel so beautifully communicated the wild intelligence and despair of the insane as Vandenburgh’s exquisite Failure to Zigzag.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“An important novel.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A stunning debut. . . . An uncompromisingly tragic novel about a teenaged girl whose mother is mad.”
—Oakland Tribune
“Almost perfect . . . Vandenburgh reveals not only her understanding of the extremes of human behavior but her prodigious facility with precise, witty language. Her characters convince us again of how we sometimes find the courage to feel other people’s pain and forgive our own.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Vandenburgh is a most accomplished writer . . . and she has a highly developed sense of the subtleties and nuances of human behavior.”
—Washington Post
“Zigzag is one of those rare books in which you identify so closely with the characters that their craziness seems like a higher form of sanity.”
—Berkeley Voice
“This is no book for a lazy reader. It’s a mental jigsaw puzzle: You piece the frame together fast enough, but those crooked pieces in the middle take some work. Keep at it, though, and the whole picture comes clear.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Comical, imaginative, and excruciatingly observant. As you read this book, you uncover another layer of meaning—that writers, too, hear voices. Jane Vandenburgh listens well.”
—Belles Lettres
I
VISTA DEL MAR
1960–1962
1
The Ainsworths’ Good Name
“Why threes, Mom?” Charlotte was asking. This was in 1960, two years before the Airstream, when Katrinka would finally get Charlotte back for good. The two of them were sitting in a booth in the soda fountain of the pharmacy on Honolulu Avenue in Montrose, California. Charlotte was fourteen.
“Why not sets of twos?” Charlotte asked. “If they went out in sets of twos, it’d be a whole lot cheaper, did you think of that?” She was watching the bottom of her soda glass where a hard blob of ice cream blocked the end of her straw. Katrinka snorted and Charlotte looked up to see her mother