Krishna
This is a kind of poor man’s Angela’s Ashes. Angela’s Ashes deals with an Irish family with a totally irresponsible father and a submissive mother. Here both the father and the mother are irresponsible and the children are trapped in a bizarre, surreal world. The setting is Ireland for Angela’s Ashes and the setting in this book is the United States. This book is a biography like the other one, and the story is told by one of the children, as in the other book.
The similarities end there. Frank McCourt paints a much deeper picture, filled with sadness, humour and an empathy that rises out of each page and immerse you in that book. Jeanette Walls tries but, in my opinion, this book is not in the same calibre as the other one. Is it still worth reading? Yes. It is a fairly interesting book, in many parts.
The story’s central characters are Rex Walls and Rose Mary Walls. Rose Mary was a town beauty in her younger days and Rex was a navy person in uniform, and woos and wins her. After the Navy, which I think he quit, he is jobless and is, frankly, a little crazy with strange ideas about life. His wife seems to go along mostly, enjoying it, even being brainwashed into believing most of it. Or perhaps she is equally strange. We are not told.
For instance, he thinks that the hospital is for wimps and forcibly removes his daughter Jeanette when she was admitted. He gets into fights or fraud to live and has to move constantly from place to place due to the place becoming too hot for the couple.
They do not even have elementary common sense when it comes to the children and in one instance, Jeanette falls out of a moving car when her family goes travelling and they discover the loss only much later, turning around to pick her up much later and laughing at how funny it is.
He always dreams of grandiose schemes to get rich – panning for gold in the desert that ‘he alone knows how to look for’.
Why was she hospitalized, she burned herself making toast. What do they do after moving to another city? Let her toast bread on the oven again. Jeanette was three or four at that time.
Her mother stays poor but Jeanette and Lori, her older sister walk out on the family to go to New York City when they grow up. Jeanette finds her mother dumpster diving when she goes out one day (and that is how the book begins).
Jeanette’s mother, the only sensible person in the family apart from the kids, it would seem, loathes Rex for what he has done to her daughter who was staid before marriage.
If you have read A Beautiful Mind, you wonder whether the father was a Bi Polar or Schizophrenic, especially when he tells and believes stories about himself where he exhibited supernatural powers. The thing I liked about the book is that Jeanette just tells her story and lets the readers come to their own conclusions, instead of hitting our heads with it.
Mother gets a job as a teacher when the dad finally disappears for good but hates working. She seems to cheat on the children by buying chocolate and other desserts when the kids are away and eating all of it, when the kids do not have much by way of food.
Brian, the youngest brother of them all, makes a guest appearance in the novel and adds colour but does not seem to be central to the plot.
Erma, the grandmother, when they visit, tries to molest Brian and is rescued by Jeanette.
Finally, we learn of all the kids leaving their parents and moving to NYC to get proper careers and live a normal life.
After that the story still goes on about Jeanette’s husband, divorce and a second husband.
The story is not bad but sags in many places and is simplistically told. It is also too long, despite the book being a short one, because, after their escape it is like reading the diary of someone’s life.
And why is it called The Glass Castle? Rex promises to build one for Jeanette and tries to make her stay to see it. The idea becomes her prison until she decides to leave, castle or no castle.
I would give the book a 5/10
– – Krishna