REAL LIFE TRAUMA

Jeannette Walls draws on her bestselling memoir to tell a familiar story of parental neglect

e can’t get enough of memoirs, it seems — at least a certain kind of memoir. Benvenuto Cellini, the great 16th-century goldsmith, artist and soldier, whose autobiography is a classic of the genre, would be surprised at our tastes. I haven’t read Cellini, but according to James Thurber the Old Master believed that you should be at least 40 years old before you wrote your memoirs. He also maintained that you should have achieved at least one thing of surpassing excellence. Otherwise, stop wasting printer’s ink.

Today’s criterion for successful memoir is that you had an atrocious childhood. Instead of rival Renaissance artists carrying concealed daggers, the antagonists in the modern memoir are criminally negligent parents. Townie, by Andre Dubus III, is a good recent example that springs to mind, the account of a childhood dogged by extreme poverty, overshadowed by bullies, lacking any sense of stability or guidance.

Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, also fits the mould. Walls’ parents, an alcoholic father and an artistic mother, failed to provide the most rudimentary requirements of care-giving, such as making sure there was food in the refrigerator. The book has been a New York Times bestseller for more than six years, a clear winner in the horrible parents sweepstakes.

Now Walls has approached this form from another angle, turning the story of two girls raised by an absent — in this case, deceased — father and an irresponsible single mom into fiction. The novel, entitled The Silver Star, opens with Liz, a young teenager, and her kid sister Jean (a.k.a. Bean), living in a small, dusty southern California town, while their mother, Charlotte Holladay, pursues her musical career as a would-be backup singer in Los Angeles. How talented Charlotte really is, the reader is never quite sure, but there is no doubt that her ambitions border on the delusional.

When her children innocently puncture a fantasy about an interested record producer, Charlotte has a temper tantrum and hits the road for destination unknown. Rather than wait for her to return, the girls, under the leadership of Liz, decide to visit Charlotte’s hometown, Byler, Va., where an Uncle Tinsley resides.

The two girls, then, end up at the front door of a surprised — and not altogether happy — Uncle Tinsley. He has the goodness, however, to put them up, at least temporarily. As the novel proceeds, Tinsley becomes closer to Liz and Bean. He’s a widower, it turns out, the scion of an old narrated by a 12-year-old. The storyline is simple: The author presents two schoolgirls left to their own devices in a world largely indifferent to their existence, stirs in a very bad man bent on doing them harm, keeps the outcome of that conflict in doubt until nearly the end of the novel. The prose, meanwhile, is brisk and down to earth. The characters are drawn in broad strokes, with very little psychologizing.

A pivotal character is the

Starving her children half to death is less criminal than her constantly

posing as a free spirit

Virginia family that once owned the town’s major industry, a cotton mill. The family’s days of glory are past, however, the mill having been sold to outside interests and the town itself doomed to slow decay. Tinsley fills his days with genealogical and geological research while his mansion crumbles around him. The household is one Confederate ghost away from being fullblown Southern Gothic.

The Silver Star feels very much like a young adult novel, and not just because it’s mom, Charlotte, a woman who means well, but her New Age enthusiasms, her “I am an artiste” attitude, are irredeemably fatuous and self-centred. No doubt the real-life mom in The Glass Castle is very much the model for Charlotte — if so, starving her children half to death is less criminal than her constantly posing as a free spirit. There is also an interesting dynamic between the two sisters. At first Liz, as befits her age, is the brains of the pair. “Liz could make sense of anything,” Bean reflects. “Her brain worked that way. Liz was talented and beautiful and funny and, most of all, incredibly smart.”

Gradually, however, as Liz fails to accept her new situation in Byler and puts on airs like her mother, the more adaptable Bean assumes de facto leadership. Late in the book, facing her most critical decision, Liz unhesitatingly turns to her younger sister for guidance.

That Walls has chosen to set The Silver Star in 1970 is not the least curious aspect of the novel. In a sense, this decision simplifies Wall’s narrative, making her sisters roughly the same age as the author in 1970. Walls can therefore draw on her own experience as an adolescent, recalling what teenagers actually said and did in that era. She doesn’t have to worry about teenagers of 2013 and their habitat — for most adults, a distant planet filled with smartphones and video games and Facebook.

Setting the novel in 1970 also emphasizes how things have changed politically since then and how they have not changed politically. In 1970, high school integration has finally come to pass — the high school attended almost entirely by whites, Byler High, and the high school attended almost entirely by blacks, Nelson High, are being combined. Walls is at pains, however, to emphasize that this process is very much a mixed blessing for the students of Nelson High. “Why would we want to go to the white school when we had our own school?” a Nelson High student tells Bean. Bean realizes, Walls writes, that “at Nelson they had their own football team, their own cheerleading squad and pep squad, their own school colours, their own homecoming king and queen. ... Now the Nelson kids had to give up those colours. And the former Nelson students knew none of them would ever be elected class president at Byler, or named homecoming king or queen, or be declared ‘Most Likely to Succeed.’ Byler would never be their school.”

As for wider issues, readers of the novel from time to time have to remind themselves, listening in on political arguments, that the disputants are talking about President Nixon and Vietnam and not about George W. Bush and Iraq. The tone and language of the earlier controversy echoes very much the tone and language of the later dispute.

No sides are taken by the author in these arguments, which is one more reason the novel is an engaging read.