The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls

Reviewed by Janice riley

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. – Oscar Wilde

Several years ago Jeannette Walls appeared on the popular television program The Colbert Report, an act of bravery in itself. During her “mock” interview with Stephen Colbert, he asked, with raised eyebrows, what her mother thought of her recently published memoir The Glass Castle. What reader can forget the image of her dumpster-diving mother glimpsed from the window of a stretch limo as Walls glides past into the glittering NY night? Her mother had told her, she replied, with perfect aplomb, to “just tell the truth.”

In a more recent New York Times interview, we learn that Walls has built a cottage for her mother a few yards from her backdoor on the Virginia estate she shares with her husband, the writer John Taylor. Although the main home was impeccably neat, inside and out, the reporter tells us, as was the exterior of the guest cottage, replete with its white picket fence, its interior was nearly squalid. He observed that Walls seemed guarded and protective of her mother and, paradoxically, admiring of her complete disregard of what others thought of her, including her daughter.

Interviews such as these offer readers an opportunity to “meet’ the author and get a glimpse of the real person behind the narrative persona and publisher’s hyperbole. The Times interview, not unlike the memoir, revealed a woman whose compassion (for a mother who brought so much suffering into her life) continues to be a daily practice. And as Walls held her own against Colbert, laughing at his teasing and playing along with his feigned attacks, she seemed like the genuine article:  a likable person, mature, honest, and self-scrutinizing. If we are left with a lasting impression, it is that Walls is as skilled at spontaneous encounters as those beyond her immediate control.

Walls’s first book, The Glass Castle, was highly praised as a memoir for its singularly amazing story crafted in beautiful language, with a sense of immediacy that was riveting. It told the story of her early family life with itinerant and irresponsible parents who would eventually become homeless. It was a passionate, intense coming of age story, written with care and skill. Her second book, Half Broke Horses, was a fictionalized memoir of her maternal grandmother’s equally remarkable story. The Silver Star, her third book, is a memorable recasting of her memoirs into the imaginary realm of literary fiction.

The novel’s two main characters are the young Holladay sisters, Bean, 12, and Liz, 15; Bean is the narrator. Her voice is clear and startling in its honesty. Their mother Charlotte is an aspiring singer, with possible schizophrenic tendencies, whose child-rearing practices and stability are highly questionable. The family is often on the move.

Every time we run into a problem, we just leave, “ I said. “But we always run into a new problem in the new place, and then we have to leave there too. We’re always just leaving. Can’t we for once just stay somewhere and solve the problem?

How dare you speak to me like that? I’m your mother.

Then act like one for a change.

I had never talked to Mom like that before.

The children are frequently left unattended. As we enter this story, their abandonment has extended for a longer period than usual; the chicken potpies are running out and the neighbors are getting suspicious. The girls long for stability and a sense of normalcy. Liz has magical memories of a laughing uncle and aunt playing the piano in a mansion on a hill with French doors opening out onto peach orchards. With her younger sister in tow, they board a cross-country bus that will take them from Southern California’s Lost Lake to Mayfield Virginia, the old family seat. Things will not be as they expected.

The parents, grandparents, and siblings who graced The Glass Castle seem traced lightly under the surface in this re-imagined childhood, shadowy watermarks we cannot help but hold up to the light: from timorous Uncle Tinsley and stalwart Aunt Al to the manipulative villain Jerry Maddox. But the life force of the novel is found in the dynamic between mother and child. If there are protective walls around the author’s heart, her mother resides within them; this is a story, oft told, that we want to hear. At times reasonable, at others delusional, Charlotte steals every scene and the narrative loses its vitality whenever she disappears from its pages. Some suspense is provided by the troubling antagonist, Jerry Maddox: a loosely paternal figure, he is the expression of all that is darkly cynical and aggressive, as opposed to the passivity of the reclusive, depressed uncle. The courtroom drama Maddox precipitates, if too predictable, does offer an effective vehicle for the mother’s failings to be exposed to public opinion; though unwittingly at the hands of the fictional daughter, perhaps not the author’s.

A certain ambiance is lent to the story line by recognizable thematic touchstones. The setting of rural Virginia allows for the particular world within a world that is the atmospheric South. The time frame of the early 1970’s places the novel within a period of contemporary history that is resonant with tumultuous cultural change. And childhood, that bastion of lost innocence, is everywhere present, embodied by archetypal children of acute sensitivity and intelligence who are resilient under pressure and resourceful in duress. Bean (as stand in for Scout Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird) is that perfectly realized eternal child many authors have embraced as their own, though rarely with as much skill.

Walls has admitted that she was afraid to reveal the secrets of her past. She feared everyone would turn against her, but the opposite occurred- they embraced her. Telling the story of her dysfunctional family was the only way she felt she could be an authentic person in the world. The power of her story, with its maturity of insight and compassion, was a graceful testament to familial love and forbearance. In writing The Silver Star, Walls has taken the opportunity (and risk) fiction offers to re-imagine her childhood. Unfortunately, the story often feels overly constructed and the novel falters at times in its contrivance; it reads as a first effort, though a laudable one. The idea that it strains to draw out is that the children have gained more compassion for their restless mother by returning to the place that defined her. Ironically, in seeking to free herself (and thereby her children) of the small-mindedness of small town life, she instilled in them instead a desire for its rooted simplicity. All fiction aside, in stark contrast to her mother, Walls’s odyssey lies within, seeking out its pure, simple, and elusive truths. When, at the book’s close, Bean tries to give her sister the treasured Silver Star, from which the book’s title is drawn, her sister refuses to accept it, telling her, “I’ll never forget that you wanted to give it to me.” It is clear to all of us by then that Bean/ Walls is the one who deserves the medal for her own bravery.

-Janice Riley