Suspension of Disbelief Via Suspension of Ghost Narrator in "The Glass Castle"

A friend of mine met Justin Bieber last summer. The day it happened, we all gathered in a taqueria to hear the story over nachos. We couldn't wait. She'd talked to him, she said. Full-on interaction. We had to have details, a good story to fill in the blank spaces where we couldn't believe it could happen to one of us. Modelo firmly in hand, my friend delivered. She worked in San Francisco talking to strangers on the street, that nonprofit fundraising/public outreach gig that twenty-somethings in the Bay get sucked into. She bumped into the Biebs on the sidewalk, where he was meandering through with a posse of henchmen, and launched into her spiel. "I asked him his name like I do with every contact," she told us, "and he was taken aback." They chatted about the issues that press our world and require our financial commitment. Then, my friend said, "He told me he liked my tattoos. He was totally trying to pick me up, right there on the street while I was telling him about Planned Parenthood. I told him my boyfriend liked my tattoos too." Cue group ooooooh-ing. We asked her to tell the story three more times throughout the evening; the encores came with the arrival of every late-coming friend - "Tell him about meeting the Biebs!" - but at the same time, we demanded the story again with a hint of hunger that bordered on suspicion.

It's not that we thought our friend was making it up. We believed what had happened. It was just a lot to take in; J-Biebs had made a pass at her, and she'd had the cool audacity to let him down like he was nobody! It was a lot to take in because we took the story in after our friend had experienced it, processed it, and made her judgments about what happened. We got the meaning she'd made of the events: her interpretation was that Bieber's compliments were come-ons, and she told the story as such. The imposition of her fully-formed meaning-making kept us from fully engaging, kept us shaking our heads, saying, "Wow, I really can't believe that happened."

This problem crops up with a ghost narrator, that hovering adult narrator who brings us back in time. When that reminiscing adult is a presence in the narration, our attention as readers goes to that act of reminiscing. It's not too distracting, but it is there. The adult is looking back. The adult has grown from these experiences. The adult has had plenty of time to reflect, process, make meaning. Again, we don't feel like the narrator is lying to us, but when we're aware of the adult storyteller, we lose the crisp vividness of feeling like we're experiencing these events firsthand and making our own meanings.

(((Plus, let's face it: a ghost narrator must contend with minimizing hints of exaggeration or fibbery the more outlandish their story is)))

I don't know why I wanted to spend so much time on what the book doesn't do, but The Glass Castle avoids this problem beautifully. Given the number of times I stopped mid-paragraph to exclaim to my girlfriend about my disbelief that these events could occur in real life, it was a brilliant choice on Walls' part to keep the aperture on the angle of discovery consistent to where the narrator was at in her life. There was no "We didn't know it at the time, but..." or "What had actually happened was..." to inject that adult meaning-making. What we got was full commitment to what was happening in the moment, and how Jeannette perceived the moment as it happened - no more and no less. That made the unbelievable moments (a.k.a. All the moments) easier to get lost in as a reader.

Walls achieves this quite cleverly by writing an evolving perception of her dad. It would be so easy for that ghost narrator to come in on page 19 and tell us that her dad had them skedaddling in the middle of the night to run away from debt, bills and responsibilities, but instead, we get what four-year-old Walls' understanding has for us, which is that "he would make mysterious references to executives from Standard Oil who were trying to steal the Texas land that Mom's family owned, and FBI agents who were after Dad for some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn't want to put us in danger, too." We get to know Rex Walls as a father by his words and behavior alone, and when Walls becomes old enough to start making her own meanings about who her dad really is, we've "grown up" with her perception and have no problem accepting it; it's like we've made that meaning ourselves.

In addition, that evolving perception (rather than perception prescribed retrospectively by an adult narrator) transforms that narrator-person into a character-person: she grows and undergoes change via conflict just like any good character in a book.