The Glass Castle - Bev Russell, Library Director

(This column appeared in the May 13, 2007, Star-Herald)

 

During the past several weeks I read some fairly intense books. This week’s book "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls is no exception. Jeannette Walls is a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com, and "The Glass Castle" is her memoir. It was one of the most engrossing, appalling, and astounding books that I ever read. Walls overcame incredible obstacles to achieve success; however, the fact that she and her siblings just survived their childhood may be the most astonishing feat of all. Jeannette’s parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, should never have had children. Both brilliant people each in their own way, they were seemingly incapable of providing adequate care for their four children.

I hardly know where to begin with this book. The Walls family gave new meaning to the term dysfunctional. Rex Walls, an alcoholic and gambler, understood the most complex theories of physics but could not hold a job or provide the most basic needs of his children. Rose Mary Walls, a self-absorbed artist, complained that she did everything for her family while refusing to even cook. Why spend fifteen minutes cooking a meal when she might create a painting for the ages? When three-year old Jeannette was critically burned, boiling water for hot dogs, her mother painted in another room. Rose Mary felt, allowing her three-year old to cook, made the child self-sufficient.

For many years, the Walls’ lived a nomadic life style in the deserts of the West, often calling their car home. When Rex occasionally worked, their homes were usually in places like an abandoned depot where no one else would live. The children slept in cardboard boxes. Frequently, they had nothing to eat or perhaps something as insubstantial as a stick of butter or whatever they could find in the desert. Incredibly, Jeannette looks upon the years wandering the desert as the best part of her childhood. When Rex’s alcoholism and Rosy Mary’s ineptitude as a teacher lead them to near starvation, the Walls moved to Rex’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia. Then things really got bad!

The Walls returned to live with Rex’s parents, who not surprisingly were also alcoholics. They moved into the basement of a dank, dark, dirty, rundown hovel of a house. Rex’s mother was an embittered woman, whose cruel childhood led her to mistreat her son and undoubtedly sexually assault him. The atmosphere in that "home" was so toxic that the Rex and Rose Mary eventually put together $1,000 to buy what was no more than a clapboard shack with a rotting porch, holes in the ceiling and no plumbing. The children frequently scrounged in the woods for something to eat. Eventually, all four children escaped from Welch and went to New York. After several years, their parents followed them so they could be a family again. Rex and Rose Mary wound up homeless, living on the streets of New York.

Told from a child’s perspective, Jeannette betrays no bitterness toward her parents and loves them in spite of their eccentricities. Rose Mary Walls is a funny, upbeat woman who can see beauty in everything. She finds living as a squatter in an abandoned building perfectly acceptable and wants nothing from her daughter except perhaps electrolysis. Rex Walls was a charismatic man, who could bring magic into the lives of his children. Because he had nothing else to give them one Christmas, he took each child into the desert and gave them a star. (Jeannette asked for Venus; and although it is really a planet, he let her have it.) How many children can look to the night sky, and know they own a star? The glass castle was his ultimate dream for his family. He continually updated plans for the castle, telling his children he would build it for them someday. "The Glass Castle" is a book of survival, love and acceptance. I recommend it to all adults who have survived a difficult childhood as well as those with some measure of normalcy in theirs.

 

 

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