THE GLASS CASTLE - Jeannette Walls - Nonfiction

There are a lot of opportunities to lay blame in THE GLASS CASTLE, Walls's memoir recounting her inconceivably impoverished childhood. At the center are Walls's parents, by all accounts two psychopaths with no business having children who nevertheless had four; her mother a delusional narcissist and her father a megalomaniacal alcoholic, Jeannette and her siblings come off remarkably normal and mentally unscathed.

We might blame Jeannette's maternal grandmother, a relatively sane older woman in possession of a large amount of land in Texas and a home in Arizona, for not doing more to curb her daughter's downward spiral, or her grandchildren's maltreatment, beyond feeding them when they came to visit, and introducing them to the only stable home they would live in for their entire childhoods. We might blame Jeannette's friends and neighbors, the people who encountered the family in its peripatetic journey across the lower half of the U.S., and failed to intervene or contact authorities. However, the one encounter Jeannette remembers having with a bureaucrat from child services ends in a detente and is never followed up, leading us to another receptacle of blame: the authorities who would allow a family such as this to exist, to allow children to live in an unheated home with no electricity or running water, sleeping in cardboard boxes and wearing tarps as blankets to avoid the leaking ceiling.

We could blame Jeannette's teachers, who offered a few opportunities to her and her sisters and brother, but never truly seemed to grasp the magnitude of their recurring familial tragedy. We might blame everyone who came into contact with Jeannette's father, Rex Walls, recognized his alcoholism and mental illness, but did nothing to have him committed. We might blame Jeannette and her siblings themselves, for not running away, calling the police on their parents, or cutting off their parents' sources of funds for good--especially when those funds were earned by the children and stolen by the parents.

Each of these failures is individually unconscionable, and snowballs into such a compendium of monstrosity as has never been encountered in the history of a successful Park Avenue resident and MSNBC correspondent. The fact that Jeannette and her siblings were able to rise from rags to riches is less a story of an American Dream fulfilled, and more a proof of the existence of psychotically capricious luck. Jeannette's story should not be inspirational, it should be prohibitory: just as Kitty Genovese's tale would not have been heartwarming had she survived her attack, so should this extended tale of crimes against children be read not as a success story but as a warning, to be a better guardian of one's community, and to remember that poverty is not an indication of saintliness, but of the existence of underlying evil.