Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen

  GIRL, INTERRUPTED - SUSANNA KAYSEN

It's not until the end of Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen that we learn the title is taken from the painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer called Girl Interrupted At Her Music. Kaysen first saw the painting just prior to her being put into a psychiatric hospital and it was the eyes of the girl in the painting that she was drawn to.

'I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something - she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn breath in order to say to me, "Don't!" I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. "Wait," she was saying "Wait! Don't go!"'

It was the eyes of the girl in the painting that were talking to her. Warning her. The girl's eyes were a forewarning, just as they were in the closing scene of the Roman Polanski film 'Repulsion' when the camera slowly zooms in on a photograph and the eyes of Catherine Deneuve as a child.

There are a slew of difference between Repulsion and Girl, Interrupted, of course, the main one being that whilst Repulsion is fiction and fantasy, Girl, Interrupted is non-fiction and actually based on real life events. The obvious comparison to make is with Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' and in fact both stories take place in the same hospital although by the time Kaysen gets there, Plath has been and gone.

The other obvious comparison to make is with Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' that apart from also being set in a psychiatric hospital, both portray a number of different characters at their respective hospitals - or rather, should that be 'patients'?

In regard to Girl, Interrupted, the subject of being a 'patient' at the psychiatric hospital is one of its main planks. Was Susanna Kaysen a 'patient' as such or a prisoner? It's a question that is wrestled with though come the end there's no clear answer. Apparently, Kaysen was advised to submit herself into the hospital by her doctor after just a twenty-minute consultation. You could do with a rest, he told her, just for a couple of weeks. So she waited in her doctor's office for a taxi that promptly came and took her away. Kaysen, essentially, went of her own volition. She was eighteen years-old and she stayed - or was held - at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts for almost two years.

The overarching question, however, is who is and what exactly is 'crazy'? For sure, some of the girls who Kaysen writes about have problems and Kaysen herself is open about her own issues too but when they're all sat together watching television and they see on the screen the horror of the Vietnam War, students beaten to a pulp by police on University campus sites, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale bound and gagged in a courtroom, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, and poor people, black people and young people everywhere being killed... it puts 'crazy' into perspective.

Was sanity simply a question of following the rules and being like everybody else? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? Was having trouble with the rules a mark of madness? Having thoughts is fine but is thinking about thoughts like throwing a stone into a pool and watching how far the ripples go? Do the ripples ever even stop? And where does the stone go? If the pool isn't clear, then how do we know when or even if it will reach the bottom?

Whilst not quite as brilliant as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is really good, particularly when it comes to the dialogue. And in particular, the dialogue of one of the girls in the hospital called Daisy, who ends up as a suicide. Susanna Kaysen, of course, eventually left the hospital and became a writer - and a very good one at that.

John Serpico