We already have had this kind of story from Jeannette Walls: the coming-of-age tale of a young, smart girl – borderline genius – struggling to make sense of an unfair situation, with her brilliant, eclectic, self-absorbed, narcissistic parents who are always discontent, weary, mal-adjusted, and prone to desultory spurts of child-abandoning mood swings, placing the children between the proverbial rock-and-a-hard-place of a hardscrabble existence, fighting for basic sustenance and essentials while clinging on to the hope that the sun will come out tomorrow. This type of story seems to be Jeannette’s M.O., the usual suspects return, and all this mess (as though previously left unexplored and unfixed in her superbly written memoir, The Glass Castle), and the anguish vomited up and left, yet again, at the doorstep of Walls’ new precocious novel, The Silver Star.
There are two ways to see this book. Looking at it this way, Liz and Bean pretty much raise themselves while their singer-songwriter mother pursues artistic ambitions and superstar dreams. Life is quite an adventure, to say the least, chicken pot pies are the main-course, and the girls spend free-time on word games while Charlotte tries to get a record deal. Soon or later the inheritance money runs out, and the three are back on road headed to nowhere, somewhere, and everywhere. Mom disappears, Liz and Bean head for small-town Byler, California (their mother’s hometown), move in with Uncle Tinsley, find jobs, enroll in school, become outcasts, and Liz is sexually assaulted by the mill boss, Maddox. Mom returns to Liz and Bean and Uncle Tinsley and they all come full-circle with past pain, neglect, terrible demons to move toward the luminescent intersection of love, redemption and forgiveness.
“Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth,” so sayeth Oscar Wilde. Fiction is a mask. And some people use it as mask-device of sorts to hide behind, perpetuating hidden agendas. So, the other way of seeing this book may leave us to question Walls’ construction of her characters. There is plenty racism in TSS. Although Charlotte seems harmlessly whimsical and free-spirited, Bean’s mother is really a racist who often reminisces “about the days when the coloreds knew their place” (21).
Furthermore, to Bean’s surprise, the Holladay family owned slaves, but “those slaves were treated well…. My great-great-grandfather Montgomery Holladay liked to say if he was down to one final crust of bread, he would, by God, have shared it with them.” Uncle Tinsley later says to Bean, “The sixties never happened in this town….and people like it that way.” The sixties – a decade mostly remembered as the civil right era – certainly evoke eventful memories of racial struggle, class conflict, and social upheaval. Maddox (Walls’ literary symbolism for anti-feminism?) is a violent misogynist, and he refers to Asians as “slopeheads.” Walls’s black characters, of course, are careful treatments of age-old stereotypes. Her “black girls…acted sassy, swinging their hips and shaking their heads, almost like they were dancing….” (127).
Another notable character is Bean’s English teach, Miss Jarvis. Following a school race-riot, Jarvis attempts to discuss the matter, to get to the bottom of what happened, asking students for their perspectives and ideas on how to cope with recent integration measures. Bean believes “the problem was that blacks were always carrying on about prejudice and slavery, even though blacks were freed a hundred years ago. And blacks could have black pride, but if you started talking about white pride, and all of a sudden it was racist. How come we can’t use the N-word, but they can call us honkies? “(150)
Bean is supposed to be smarter than that. Or Walls and Bean represent something much more sinister, which is immutably prevalent in this so-called post-racial society. It’s always there because it has always been there, tucked away in neat, carefully coded language, hidden away, jagged corrupt meaning, a private conspiracy of loaded words called fiction (sort of like Mein Kampf translated).
James Baldwin encouraged us to pull back the layers to find the meaning behind the words. That’s the burden, to understand the incorrigible need and wicked desire. But there is something good and salvageable about The Silver Star. It is an extremely well-written book with plenty social and personal value (depending on the reader), and Walls is remarkably talented and insightful. But there is too much left unexplored and unexamined – stuff and junk just dumped onto the page, left alone and abandoned like a mound of puzzle pieces. I wanted honesty and genuineness. And, with TSS, I didn’t get any of that. Just cleverly arranged words. And coded messages.
what about the kennedys 