The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Overly-Woke to Family Values

Jeanette Walls should not be alive. Her actuarial chance of surviving was close to zero in her Keystone Cops version of childhood. With two dipsy parents, one a violent drunk, the other a spaced-out avatar of Vishnu, she had experiences which the SAS would have had difficulty enduring. Severe scalding, scorpion bites, being thrown from a moving car, locked in the back of a truck for fourteen hours, incipient starvation, drowning, and mauling by a cheetah, not to mention numerous punctures, falls, fights, and a questionable diet - these were routine events before she turned eight years old. Medical care was for sissies according to dad. And according to mother “Fussing over children who cry only encourages them.”

Both mom and dad were fantasists, and therefore good story-tellers. Their poverty, instability, inability to create social relationships, they claimed, were a blessing. The children could grow up hardened to the world’s oppression. And boy was there a lot of that. Dad was paranoid about the FBI, the CIA, and all the other members of the police-gestapo who were out to get him. But, hey, the constant need to be ready to ‘skedaddle’ from any temporary home in some God-forsaken mining shanty town was an opportunity to see the country wasn’t it? An education in itself really. And dad’s get-rich-quick ideas for gold-mining were sure to pay off just as soon as he could get the necessary capital together at the Las Vegas craps tables.

Walls inherited her father’s story-telling gene. She writes with wit and humour about a deplorable life with incompetent and psychotic parents. I find this distressing. The issue is not one of an acceptably eccentric alternative life style, or of an odd upbringing being overcome, or of children loving their parents in tough circumstances. It’s patently about unnecessary and avoidable abuse. Walls’s wit and humour romanticize her life. The poignancy of her portrayal of the caring dad after he almost killed her yet again, with no apparent irony much less sarcasm, is typical: "’You don't have to worry anymore, baby,’ Dad said. ‘You're safe now.’” This makes her book popular. And it may provide a way for her to deal with the effects of her childhood. It will certainly make a good film. But the fact is that on her testimony her parents are criminally irresponsible people who are lucky they weren’t caught and prosecuted. If it were an episode of SVU, Benson would have nailed them.

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