Half Changed World

Last week, I was reading and I must have made a noise, because T said "what?"  I said, "Nothing, I’m just feeling overwhelmed by the book I’m reading."  "Is it as bad as Bastard Out of Carolina?" he asked, that having set the standard years ago by leaving me staring into space and whimpering as I finished it.  "Almost."

The book I was reading was The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeanette Walls and it is both heartbreaking and challenging.  It’s the story of her childhood with parents who simultaneously opened up worlds for their children — worlds of literature and art, of geology, natural history, and astromony — and who failed at the most basic tasks of parenting — keeping their kids fed and safe.  She writes of her first memory — catching on fire at age 3, as she cooked hot dogs for herself — and of her father giving her Venus for Christmas one year.  She writes of living in a leaking house, without heat, indoor plumbing, or electricity, and of stealing discarded lunches from the trashcans at school.  She writes of riding in back of a U-Haul truck, and of her father yelling at her and her siblings when they finally caught his attention and pointed out the that the doors had opened.  And she writes of her father bringing her to see the cheetah at the zoo, and bringing her up to the cage to let it lick the salt from popcorn off her hands:

"I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?  None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah."

Imagine Angela’s Ashes if, instead of doing her best to feed her family in spite of her husband’s drunkeness, Angela had been an artist who thought it was a waste of time to cook, thought it was unfair to expect her to hold a steady job, and hoarded food from the children.

But what makes the book so wrenching isn’t the depths of the poverty to which the Walls family sank, or even the domestic violence, alcoholism, and mental illness that shadowed their lives, but the moments of beauty and wonder that are interspersed with all of the above.  I don’t doubt that the Walls kids should have been in foster care, but Jeanette Walls makes clear that something important would have been lost as well as much gained.  (The one time that a social worker does try to investigate the family, the children cover up for the parents, fearing — probably with cause — that they’d be separated from each other.)

The other book that I was reminded of was The Mosquito Coast.  If you’ve only seen the movie, you won’t understand why, because in the movie, Harrison Ford’s character just seems like a egomaniacal lunatic.  But in the book, the story is filtered through the perspective of his son, who believes in him.  Like Allie Fox, Rex Walls is a man of a million plans.  (The "Glass Castle" of the title is the house that he was constantly designing blueprints for, even as their real house slid down the side of the mountain.)

The Glass Castle has at least somewhat of a happy ending, as the Walls children move away from their parents and at least three of the four grow into basically happy and functional adults.  (The youngest stabs their mother after an argument, is institutionalized for a year, and then moves away and loses contact with the family.)  The parents continue to live by their "ideals" (or their madness) choosing to live as squatters in New York rather than accept assistance from their children or anyone else.  And ultimately, Jeanette is more forgiving of her parents than I could imagine, accepting them for who they are.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Books, Parenting, Poverty and Class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.