The Glass Castle

'Even Hitler Had His Redeeming Qualities: A Book Review of The Glass Castle.'

Her father was a genius and an alcoholic.  Her mother, a self-proclaimed "excitement addict" prone to bouts of depression.  And by the age of thirteen, Jeannette Walls had to take on the role of being the head of her household: planning out the monthly budget, feeding her two younger siblings, and allowing her father's bar buddy to flirt with and nearly molest her in order for her dad to win a pool game.  And you thought your family was crazy?

A New York Times Bestseller, The Glass Castle is Walls' bittersweet memoir about her dysfunctional yet spirited family, written in a way that is at times strikingly amusing but is also deeply heartbreaking.  It is a story about survival, fearlessness, and non-conformity sans sappiness or moralizing, told through real-life characters who swim in public fountains to cool off when air-conditioning cannot be paid for and who dream of building houses made completely of glass -- a family that was "always supposed to pretend [its] life was one long and incredibly fun adventure," even when in reality, it wasn't.

Walls expertly shares her conflict of mind and heart with the reader; from the opening scene in which she sees her mother rooting through trash on a New York City street, the reader finds Walls to be both ashamed of her mother and ashamed of the life she herself has come to live -- a life of Park Avenue apartments, antique collectibles, and Vivaldi on the stereo -- everything that she never would have dreamed to gain as a child.  Such tension becomes a theme of Walls' life (and consequently, of her memoir) but as her mother encourages her to do when so conflicted, she just tells the truth, and it results in a book that is honest, blunt, and, in terms of covering every emotional angle, complete.

Following the New York City scene, the book flashes back to Walls' earliest memories of living in the Arizona desert.  She writes very symbolically, for she opens the section entitled "The Desert" with a vivid description of the time when, at the age of three, she set herself on fire while cooking hot dogs.  This scene alone serves as an indication of what her family life was like -- what three-year-old is able, let alone allowed, to boil hot dogs on a stove by herself? -- but it also foreshadows the many conflagrations, both figurative and literal, that are to occur in the coming years (and the subsequent pages.)  As she later explains, "I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire.  It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes."  While such symbolism is prevalent throughout the book, Walls' writing is by no means cryptic or overly flowery; the symbolism subtly ties together the events of Walls' life and underlies each one with the anticipation that something chaotic is likely to occur at any given moment.

Such chaos marks the Walls family's housing situation; they are inclined to leave a given location at a moment's notice -- "doing the skedaddle," as Rex Walls, the father, calls it -- due to insolvency or some sketchy situation into which Rex has gotten, and the four Walls children are not strangers to sleeping in cardboard boxes while Rose Mary, their mother, insists on spending the family's money on a piano.  But even though the Walls' transient housing is permanent bedlam, there are still moments when, despite all hardships, some good i found in a situation.  When Rex and Rose Mary cannot afford to buy Christmas presents one year, they tell their children that there is no Santa Claus, that in fact he is actually a fictional creation that rich kids' parents use to deceive them.  It may be difficult for the reader to determine whether or not Rex and Rose Mary have their children's best interests in mind when saying or doing such a thing, but Walls alludes to the fact that they were doing it for the good of their children.  For instead of giving his children toys or board games or clothes, Rex tells them that they may pick a star out of the sky for each to call his or her own, and that star is to be their Christmas present.  "We all laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys," Walls writes.  And as her father reassures, "Years from now, when all that junk they got is broken and long forgotten...you'll still have your stars."  Even though not every situation the family faces has its silver lining like this Christmas did, Walls' writing clearly shows why they family's motto was 'what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.'  It is appropriate, then, that when the Walls are forced to move in with Rex's drunkenly detestable mother Erma in a down-and-out West Virginia town (after living in a comparably beautiful home in Phoenix), Rose Mary tries to instill hope and persistence in her children by telling them that even Hitler had his good qualities -- Hitler loved dogs.

While People Magazine compares The Glass Castle to the likes of Frank McCourt, I would sooner associate Walls' work with Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors, another autobiography about a more-than-quirky family that I read in a matter of days (unlike Angela's Ashes, of which after three attempts, I have still read only twenty pages.)  The Glass Castle is a quick read, but it has substance --it is not the sort of thing you would associate with the easy-to-read quality of, say, a Baby-Sitters Club book.  It is a quick read simply because it tells a remarkable story, and it tells it well.  Walls pulls you in right from the beginning and keeps you there, making it one of those hard-to-put-down books deserving of its title of "bestseller."