The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, a Memoir
This is a review of The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls It is a memoir, extraordinary in so many ways: the subject, the vivid descriptions of place and of people; the poignancy of the personal attachments. It is a page turner from the opening sentence.
Is it probably exaggerated? In my opinion, yes, but that is what makes it so appealing, the extremes it presents.
The primary personalities, the alcoholic father and mother are mind boggling. For Jeanette Walls her father was a knight in shining armor. Everything he did, no matter how bizarre and disappointing was either wonderful or accepted. You, as the reader love him, too.
The mother is a different story. Yes, her ideas were flamboyant, colorful, and different. But to the reader, the mother comes across as self indulgent, opinionated, and a spin artist, twisting reality to her purpose at every step of the way. Is that subjective or is it because it oozes out of Jeanette Walls words themselves? I think the latter.
The shocking opening pages where Jeanette, in a taxi, in New York City spots her mother rifling through street garbage and then, without stopping, allows herself to be driven to her destination.
The story continues with a flashback to her childhood and a great description of the family stopping in the desert to sleep, under the stars, with her father giving his children his love of nature, a gift indeed, and the memory of that night under the stars, etched in her mind forever.
The glass castle that her dad hopes to build for the family to live in some day is a continual thread running through the memoir. His unrealistic hopes that nonetheless, while Walls is young, seem quite plausible to her and something she can respect and admire.
The gutter vocabulary used by the parents and grandparents in every day discourse is something you get used to, even though you might be astonished as I was at the way Mom and Dad speak of their parents, and speak to their parents.
The children's ordeals at school are painful for the reader. The other children laugh at their tattered clothing, their body odor, the stink surrounding their home. The Walls haven't enough money to pay for garbage disposal, so the parents dug a pit near the house and threw their garbage in the pit.
As they grew older, the magic the father was able to weave diminished. The older sister left as quickly as she could for New York. Jeanette soon followed, joining her sister.
When they could they brought their younger brother and sister along. How, despite the trials and tribulations, they could have the inspiration and resolve to try to lift themselves out of the depths to which the family had sunk, is quite challenging, although not all of them were successful.
The ingredients are all there: two alcoholic parents, add four children and mix in indulgence and love. It's the recipe for a cocktail called Disaster.
This is a story not to be missed, 288 pages in paperback, published by Scribner.
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