Penguinlady's Full Review: Jeannette Walls - The Glass Castle
Remember Frank McCourt’s book, Angela’s Ashes? It came out about ten years ago and raised a shiver of horror among readers who obsessively turned the pages of this incredible story of a childhood that defines the term “neglect.” I was among those, and some of the images stayed with me all these years.
They have recently been displaced, however, by the hair-raising ones generated by Jeannette Walls’ new book, The Glass Castle.
Jeannette is the second of four children born to Rex and Rose Mary Walls, a free-spirit couple who should have been sterilized at birth. Married in 1956, they squirted out their kids with little or no consideration of their responsibilities as parents. Their children essentially raised themselves as the family wandered through the dismal small towns of the west and West Virginia.
Rose Mary, a classic narcissist, fancied herself a creative spirit, an artist and writer whose need for art supplies and writing paper always trumped her kids need for food. She resented them for keeping her from having been a famous artist, and was known to hoard food for herself while her kids went hungry; the creative spirit must be fed, dontcha know. But she was also a trained teacher, and except for two brief periods, refused to work because it would impinge on her creativity, preferring instead to live with her family in unimaginable squalor. After having taught her kids to read by the time they were five, she completely abdicated any further parental responsibility, while claiming proud credit for their intelligence and self-sufficiency. However, she could always be counted on to spout the nonsensical aphorism, regardless of what happened to her kids. When she was three, Jeannette was badly burned when her dress caught fire as she cooked herself some hot dogs because Rose Mary was too busy painting to cook for her. She spent six weeks in the hospital before being spirited out by her parents - jumping the bill, of course - and had a large scar that stayed with her for life.
A few days after Mom and Dad brought me home, I cooked myself some hot dogs. I was hungry, Mom was at work on a painting, and no one else was there to fix them for me.
“Good for you,” Mom said when she saw me cooking. “You’ve got to get right back in the saddle You can’t live in fear of something as basic as fire.”
Rose Mary’s nonchalant attitude toward child-rearing knew no bounds. There’s no passage in the book when her sense of maternal protectiveness is aroused, no time when she puts the needs of her children before her own, no occasion that she doesn’t rise to with a self-serving aphorism.
In this passage, Lori, the oldest child, had poured kerosene onto the wet wood in the pot-belly, to make it burn better, because her parents refused to spend money on coal. Of course, the can exploded.
Lori was lurching around the living room, her eyebrows and bangs all singed off and the smell of burned hair in the air... Nothing in the house except Lori’s hair had caught fire, but the explosion had... scorched her thighs. Brian (the third child and only boy) went out and got some snow, and we packed it on Lori’s legs, which were dark pink. The next day she had blisters the length of her thighs.
“Just remember,” Mom said after examining the blisters, “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”
“If that was true, I’d be Hercules by now,” Lori said.
And when a giant rat took up residence in their shack, partying in the sugar-filled punch-bowl, eating the unrefrigerated food on the shelves - there was rarely electricity, so no fridge - and scaring the bejesus out of the kids, Rose Mary refused to kill it, even after it bit Maureen, the youngest child, in her bed.
Mom said she felt sorry for the rat. “Rats need to eat, too,” she pointed out. Even though it was dead, it deserved a name, she went on, so she christened it Rufus.
And one evening as her kids tried to keep their minds off their empty bellies after not having eaten for two days,
...Mom kept disappearing under the blanket on the sofa bed. At one point, Brian looked over.
“Are you chewing something?” he asked.
“My teeth hurt,” Mom said, getting all shifty-eyed, glancing around the room and avoiding our stares. “It’s my bad gums. I’m working my jaw to increase the circulation.”
Brian yanked the covers back. Lying on the mattress next to Mom was one of those huge family-sized Hershey chocolate bars, the shiny silver wrapper pulled back and torn away. She’d already eaten half of it.
Mom started crying. “I can’t help it,” she sobbed. “I’m a sugar addict, just like your father is an alcoholic.”
She told us we should forgive her the same way we always forgave Dad for his drinking.
Rex, on the other hand, was deeply devoted to his kids, and actually seems to have deluded himself that the way of life he and his wife were foisting on them was to their benefit. An electrical engineer, he taught them math, and exposed them to the wonders of nature. His attention was sporadic, though, and always aimed at their minds; he doesn’t seem to have paid any more attention to the physical squalor in which they lived than Rose Mary did. He did occasionally get a decent, or as he termed it, a dead-end drone job, usually as an electrician in a mine, but never kept it very long because as a firm believer in the corruption of all forms of authority, he’d get fired for mouthing off. As his drinking spiraled deeper and deeper into alcoholism, his stops at the bar for a beer evolved to the point where he was stealing money from his children and disappearing for days on end while his kids scavenged the hillsides for edible weeds and his wife painted. A dreamer, he was convinced that he had found the ideal way to extract gold from rubble, and spent what little money was left after his binges on ever-more grandiose schemes to strike it rich. Meanwhile, when the family started falling through holes that opened up in the dry-rotted floor, he refused to fix them, insisting that avoiding them would help his children develop agility and balance; the kids patched them by hammering flat his beer cans and nailing them over the smaller holes.
The title of the book is derived from one of his more grandiose dreams, the Glass Castle that he planed to build for the family. It would be made of thick glass and have all the latest technological advantages. All he had to do was find investors so he could develop and sell his method of purifying gold, and they’d all be rich enough for him to build his Glass Castle. Needless to say, the furthest he got beyond the blueprint stage was when the kids dug a deep hole for the foundation on the north side of a hill in West Virginia; when the trash company stopped picking up because the Walls hadn’t paid their bill, he simply started dumping the garbage into the foundation hole. That was when his children realized that the Glass Castle would never be more than a blueprint, but he never seems to have lost sight of that dream.
He appears the more sympathetic character, partly because the soul recoils in horror at the idea of a neglectful mother, while fathers get away with it to a much greater extent. And he actually did pay attention to his children, endowing Jeannette with a pet name, Mountain Goat, buying them bikes when he had some money, and taking them out to teach them about the stars and geology around them. On one memorable occasion, not having anything for them for Christmas, he took them out to the desert one by one and let them select a star for their very own. His failures may be regarded as those of a well-intentioned man who was simply incapable of raising children or controlling his own selfish and destructive impulses, while Rose Mary comes off as the witch, completely self-absorbed and unwilling to consider anyone else’s needs. His manipulative-alcoholic charm carries him, while she just appears selfish and manic-depressive. There’s a certain sociopathology to their personas.
And yet.
And yet... The glimmer of parental love occasionally shows through in Rex, including at the end of his fairly short life when Jeannette confides in him that she’s short $1000 for her college tuition. He, homeless and ragged in New York, disappears and returns a few days later with his pockets stuffed with crumpled bills; he’s won $950 in poker games and turns it all over to his daughter.
“Dad,” I said, “you guys need this money more than I do.”
“It’s yours,” Dad said. “Since when is it wrong for a father to take care of his little girl?”
And that, I believe, is the crux of his parenting style. He may haul his family from one dumpy dead-end town to the next, he may doom them to abject poverty and squalor, he may drink up what little money there is, he may shrug as his kids scrounge the neighborhood trash bins for food, he may steal from them... but somewhere in his drink-sodden persona is a tiny spark of caring that bursts forth at some very unlikely times. And he truly believes that he's taking care of his family.
What isn’t clear is why either of them, but especially Rose Mary, was willing to live as they did, dumpster-diving, scavenging moldy food, and wearing threadbare, filthy discards. She had been reared in a middle-class household in Phoenix, and the children were awestruck when they visited their maternal grandmother and saw rugs, and lights that worked, and toilets that flushed, and ate regular meals of food that wasn’t rotten, moldy, or maggoty. She owned leased oil land in Texas that generated a small income, as well as her mother’s house in Phoenix, and had a very usable teaching credential. So the family could easily have lived at a much higher level - homeless people lived at a higher level - than they did.
Rex, on the other hand, came from the worst, most dismal, surroundings in a small coal town in West Virginia, from a “mother,” for lack of a better word, who, having been caught sexually molesting Brian, her grandson, was suspected of having done the same to her own son. His demons drove him to his inability to be pinned down to a job, or one place; he claimed that he couldn’t work in the mines until he had first completely reformed the corrupt United Mine Workers union.
Rose Mary didn’t have any discernable demons; she was simply, in her own words, an adventure junkie who regarded $50 cars, middle-of-the-night flights out of town to escape irate landlords and the police, a tumble-down shack without running water or electricity, filthy half-starved kids, and no steady income as “adventure.” She spent her time either reading in bed or working on her art and writing. So determined was she that nothing, not even her kids, would stand in her way, that on their innumerable flights from town to town in those $50 cars, the kids had to leave behind their clothes, bikes, and meager treasures, for lack of space, but there was always room for her art materials and typewriter. As she said, “Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be done in an hour when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?”
And, here, after the oldest child, Lori, desperately hungry, eats the last of the margarine:
When Mom got home that evening, she looked in the refrigerator. “What happened to the stick of margarine?” she asked.
“We ate it,” I said.
Mom got angry. She was saving it, she said, to butter the bread. We already ate all the bread, I said. Mom said she was thinking of baking some bread if a neighbor would loan us some flour. I pointed out that the gas company had turned off our gas.
...It was because of my and Lori’s selfishness, she said, that if we had any bread, we’d have to eat it without butter.
Both Rex and Rose Mary are the most powerful argument I’ve ever encountered for sterilization, or at least parental licensing. That their kids grew up even half-way healthy is testament to their own hardship-annealed survival skills; their parents had nothing to do with it beyond exposing them to situations in which those skills had to be honed.
The saddest thing about this book is that with two notable exceptions, there’s not one single adult in it who isn’t worthy of being shot at dawn. Rex and Rose Mary are incredibly unfit parents. Rex’s mother, Erma, a child molester who locks her grandkids in her unheated West Virginia basement in the winter and refuses to feed them because Jeannette has been seen in the company of a black girl at school, is irredeemable. Her other son, Uncle Stanley, is a toothless layabout who still lives with his parents, where he lies around swilling beer while watching TV and jerking off in the living room in full view of his nieces and nephew. Jeannette’s teachers, when she went to school, were unfailingly cruel and incompetent.
The two exceptions were Grandma Smith, Rose Mary’s mother, who didn’t put up with her daughter’s laxity and insisted that the children be fed and clothed and taught manners and rules on their rare sojourns in Phoenix. The other was Ginnie Sue, the mother of eight daughters and a son, who is actually kind to Jeannette and feeds her. Ginnie Sue has a reputation for being somewhat easy, but she turns out to be the only friendly person in all of Welsh, West Virginia. Too bad she’s only in the book for about a page.
Against overwhelming odds, Jeannette grew up strong and self-reliant, earning a degree from Barnard and becoming a commentator on MSNBC. It's tempting to see her book as self-serving exaggeration, but running through it like a strong spider-web is her devotion to her father, and her wry admiration of her mother. She seems their manifest failings very clearly, but somehow manages to maintain a measure of love for them.
This is probably the most hair-raising passage in the book. Prepare yourself.
Jeannette has just been molested by her Uncle Stanley, her father’s brother.
... I hurried out to Mom. “Mom, Uncle Stanley has been behaving inappropriately,” I said.
“Oh, you’re probably imagining it,” she said.
“He groped me! And he’s wanking off!”
Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. “Poor Stanley,” she said. “He’s so lonely.”
“But it was gross!”
Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go,” she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. “So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you’re stronger than that.” She went back to her crossword puzzle.
Unless your name is Lori, Jeannette, Brian, or Maureen Walls, be thankful for the parents you had.
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had fo...More at HotBookSale
In the tradition of Mary Karr s The Liars Club and Rick Bragg s All Over But the Shouting, Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming m...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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