| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
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Sunday, September 21 2008 @ 12:37 AM EDT |
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1239 times |
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The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
The Glass Castle is a testament to the toughness of filial love, the endurance of a girl-child’s imagination and hope, and the necessity of maintaining compassion in order to present a history that offers, even in the face of horrible adversity, a semblance of truth.
Jeanette Walls achieves this in her heart-rending autobiography, a page-turner as lucid and arid as Frank McCourt’s novel, Angela’s Ashes.
Saddled with an alcoholic father as reprobate and unpredictable as Huck Finn’s Pa, and a mother equally ineffectual yet somehow slightly more forgivable (an artist with stars for eyes and a self-professed addiction to excitement), Jeanette and her siblings fight their way through dozens of broken-down towns and a steady parade of in-your-face schoolyard bullies, sleep in cardboard boxes beneath roofs that stop neither rain nor snow, and eat scraps of rancid nothing for weeks on end. And yet Jeanette manages consistently to forgive the delinquency of her parents, to transcend their negligence and brutality, and to understand them somehow despite their never-ending ignorance of their children’s needs.
Sometimes the reader can side with her perceptions of them, as the life they offered, viewed from a certain angle, did defy the abhorred establishment. They did sleep under the stars, catch snakes, and learn the names of the constellations by direct observation. There was certainly plenty of excitement, escaping from schools and bill-collectors in old beater-cars, and living in more towns than the average American ever reads about. And, thanks to Jeanette’s mother, they became avid, far-above average readers of books; as a consequence, Jeanette’s fluent writing developed both as a survival strategy and a logical outcome to a life where books offered more answers and stability than did everyday life.
To watch Jeanette survive, co-parent her younger siblings, and, finally, to see them all find their way successfully into adulthood (due more, it seems, to their parents' lack of, rather than, attention) is the interesting final turn that Wall’s story takes. Their parents end up homeless by choice, and, alternatively, the children invite them into their homes for home-cooked meals and pep talks.
Blueprints for the construction of a “glass castle” were drawn up by Jeanette’s some-times-brilliant father but, like most of his promises, were never realized, and remained like periodic lightning flashes that illuminated the mirages her parents pursued as they dragged their children across the deserts of America.
Jeannette Walls. The Glass Castle: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. 304 pages.
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