The+Glass+Castle-Barron

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Scribner, 2005

'The Glass Castle': Outrageous Misfortune
Published: March 13, 2005
 * By FRANCINE PROSE**


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EMOIRS are our modern fairy tales, the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm reimagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked and served to the family for dinner. What the memoir writer knows is what readers of Grimm intuit: the loving parent and the evil stepparent may in reality be the same person viewed at successive moments and in different lights. And so the autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of describing the narrow escape from being baked into gingerbread while at the same time attempting to understand, forgive and even love the witch. How fitting, then, that the title of Jeannette Walls's chilling memoir, The Glass Castle, should evoke the architecture of fantasy and magic. The transparent palace that Walls's father often promised to build for his children functions as a metaphor for another fanciful construct, the carefree facade with which two people who were (to say the least) unsuited to raise children camouflaged their struggle to survive in a world for which they were likewise ill equipped. REX WALLS was a gifted, seductive and deeply damaged man whose little bit of a drinking situation made it impossible for him to hold the jobs (as a mining engineer and an electrician) he procured through a dazzling mix of prevarication and charismatic charm. Rose Mary Walls, a painter, writer, free spirit and self-styled excitement addict, entertained certain convictions about life in general and parenthood in particular that, all too predictably, helped pave the road to grief and disaster. Reared by a mother who believed that kids should be left alone to reap the educational and immunological benefits of suffering, Jeannette Walls, her brother and two sisters rapidly discovered that their peripatetic, hardscrabble life -- constantly moving from one bleak, dusty Southwestern mining town to another -- had no end of painful lessons to teach them. At 3, Walls was so severely burned while boiling hot dogs that she required skin grafts and spent six weeks in the hospital, from which her father rescued her, ignoring the alarmed cries of a nurse. The experience left Jeannette with physical scars and a worrisome case of pediatric pyromania. The memoir offers a catalog of nightmares that the Walls children were encouraged to see as comic or thrilling episodes in the family romance. Pursued by bill collectors (or, as Rex claimed, conspiratorial F.B.I. agents), the family made a getaway so hasty that Dad felt compelled to toss Jeannette's recalcitrant cat out the car window. Bitten by a scorpion, 4-year-old Lori suffered convulsions. Accidentally hurtled from the family station wagon onto a railroad embankment, Jeannette had to wait in the desert sun until her parents realized she was missing; while she scraped off the blood, her father plucked pebbles out of her face with pliers. Jeannette was molested by a neighborhood pervert. Later, when her parents resolved to throw themselves on the slim mercies of Rex's family, they moved to West Virginia -- to a vile hamlet along a river distinguished by having, her father proclaimed, the highest level of fecal bacteria of any river in North America -- where Jeannette was groped by an uncle. A visit to the zoo ended when Rex and his daughter reached inside the cheetah's cage to pet the giant cat, while a family holiday erupted in flames as prankish Dad set the Christmas tree ablaze with his cigarette lighter. Along the way, the children enjoyed a characteristically idiosyncratic version of home schooling. Their mother taught them reading and the health advantages of drinking unpurified ditch water, while their father explained ''how we should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us. He showed us how to aim and fire his pistol, how to shoot Mom's bow and arrows, and how to throw a knife by the blade so that it landed in the middle of a target with a satisfying thwock. Walls recalls that by the time I was 4, I was pretty good with Dad's pistol, a big black six-shot revolver, and could hit five out of six beer bottles at 30 paces. . . . It was fun. Dad said my sharpshooting would come in handy if the feds ever surrounded us.'' Surely it suggests something about our educational system that whenever the Walls children did attend school they turned out to be academically ahead of the local kids, who tormented them for their outsider oddness.

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