Banana Kiss

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Robin Farber, the protagonist of Banana Kiss, would be a dynamic woman
even without her mental illness: funny, sardonic, insightful,
intelligent. But it is her schizophrenia that informs her thoughts and
behaviour, and determines the relationships she has with her friends,
her family, and the staff at Berkshire, the institution in which she
lives. Robin’s voices—especially that of her dead father—appear,
disappear, and reappear with a regularity largely determined by whether
or not she takes her medications. “Without those pills,” she says,
“I can actually feel something. I feel angry, but that’s good. At
least I feel something.” Much of this anger is directed at her former
lover, Max, who has dumped her for Melissa, her older sister. “It’s
not right,” Robin thinks, “that I shouldn’t feel angry at Max and
Melissa after all they did … They planned it from the first moment,
how Max was going to lead me on, and pretend to love me.”

Rozanski drops hints throughout the book that it is this betrayal that
triggered Robin’s illness, but, though Robin herself believes it,
schizophrenia is rarely so easy to diagnose. Dr. Mankiewicz is the
sympathetic chief psychiatrist at Berkshire and as much as anyone in the
novel is responsible for her behaviour. Others who influence her are her
mother and stepfather, and especially Derek, the young manic-depressive
whom she meets and befriends in the institution and who falls in love
with her. This relationship forms the core of the book and it is handled
with humour and compassion.

Rozanski describes the murky world of mental illness without being in
any way pedantic or mawkish. She’s written an excellent first novel.