Tomorrow,
April 21, is Jeannette Walls’ 56th birthday.
Unfortunately, in the literary world, her birthday will be overshadowed
by the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth.
I decided to honour Walls a day early by posting my review of her
most recent novel, The Silver Star. (If you haven’t read her memoir, The Glass Castle, I would definitely
recommend it.)
3
Stars
Having
loved Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle,
I looked forward to reading her most recent novel. Unfortunately, her work of
fiction is not of the same quality.
It is 1970.
Two sisters, Liz, 15, and Jean, 12, are abandoned by their mother so they leave
their home in California and take a bus to Byler, Virginia, to visit their
Uncle Tinsley, their mother’s brother, who still lives in the ancestral home.
The girls end up staying and taking part-time jobs working for Jerry Maddox, a
foreman for the town’s major employer, who has no qualms about using his
position to get people to do what he wants.
Jean, known
as Bean, is the narrator. Is the name a derivation of the author’s name and is
the relationship between Liz and Jean just a reworking of the Lori and
Jeannette relationship described in The
Glass Castle? Therein lies a problem I have with the novel: there are so
many parallels between the memoir and the novel. Bean is like Jeannette in her
adventurous spirit; Liz is like Lori, Jeanette’s bookish older sister.
Charlotte, Liz and Bean’s mother, is a free spirit like Rose Mary Walls. Both Bean
and Jeannette come to feel differently about their parents and the bohemian
lifestyle imposed by them. Both books show girls surviving and thriving despite
the adults around them.
The book is
also derivative in that Bean is like an older version of Jean Louise (Scout)
Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. She
is precocious and feisty and because of a court case learns about the
unfairness of the world and the meaning of courage. Jerry Maddox, the novel’s
villain, resembles Bob Ewell in Harper Lee’s novel: he does not hesitate to
intimidate children. Aunt Al is the Calpurnia figure who serves as a surrogate
mother.
Another
issue with the book is the stereotypical characterization. Jerry Maddox, the
villain, has no redeeming qualities. The book jacket describes him well: “a big
man who bullies his workers, his tenants, his children, and his wife.” Everyone
fears him because of his power in the small town. School officials are
portrayed as clueless. For example, Miss Clay, a vice principal, chastises Bean
for being unladylike (shades of Scout again) and even says, “’School officials
never get to the bottom of these quarrels, and in my mind, we shouldn’t try’”
(190). Aunt Al is too good to be believable: “Aunt Al also had it really tough
. . . but she never complained. Instead, she was always talking about how
blessed she was” (115).
There are
symbols in the novel, but they lack subtlety. That the Silver Star is a symbol
of courage is obvious so when Bean tries to give her father’s medal to a
person, she is clearly recognizing that person’s bravary. The emus on a
neighbour’s farm are symbols of outsiders. Liz especially identifies with them,
describing them as “special” because they are “beautifully weird” (94) and even
says, “She felt that she was sort of like an emu herself” (241).
I can see
this book being used, like To Kill a
Mockingbird, in junior classes in high school. It has a spunky narrator
young adult readers will identify with as she struggles to find her place in a
world which has not provided her with much stability. Like Bean, adolescents
ask questions such as, “Was there such a thing as completely right and
completely wrong” (86). The themes are developed clearly using symbols that
students will be able to identify fairly easily. It is not a demanding read and
begs comparison to Lee’s novel which virtually all students encounter in their
literature classes.
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