The Parent Booby Trap

By Lev Grossman

There has always been a game of one-downsmanship among modern memoirists as to who has the weirdest, most dysfunctional, most damaging parents. Granted, Kathryn Har- rison more or less ran the table with 1997's The Kiss, which describes her four-year affair with her father, and Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) and Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) aren't far behind. But there's spirited competition for fourth place. Two new memoirs, Michael Rips' The Face of a Naked Lady (Houghton Mifflin; 192 pages) and Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle (Scribner; 288 pages), are worthy contenders.

Rips believed that his father was the epitome of all things placidly, plainly Midwestern: "Born in Nebraska, he was Republican, affluent and content." But after Rips' father died, a loose thread appeared: a portfolio of paintings of a naked black woman. Nobody knew who the woman was or anything about the nature of her relationship to the family patriarch. Rips began tugging at the thread, and before long the whole gray flannel suit unraveled.

He hired a detective and began rummaging through his father's life and his own childhood, both of which were spent in Omaha, Neb. Rips discovered, for starters, that his father was raised in a brothel, which was run by Rips' great-grandparents. He revisited some vivid memories of his own childhood: a local handyman who always walked down stairs backward, a tornado that sucked his grandmother up through a garbage chute. When he was 9 years old, Rips watched a circus acrobat plunge to her death from a 50-ft. pole. (Naked Lady shares a kind of adolescent gothic vibe with Frank Conroy's excellent Stop-Time.)

Rips isn't horrified by any of this. Instead he manages, by dint of a gift for calm reflection, to accept and ultimately be made wiser by it. His writing is bluff and simple but often quite funny and sophisticated. He takes gently learned excursions through the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and he uses the fact that his father managed an eyeglasses factory to weave symbolic variations on the theme of blindness and vision. His aim is not just to chivy out the secrets of a man who didn't appear to have any but also to understand how they could have remained secret for so long--why it is that, as Rips puts it, "we are often in greatest ignorance of the place to which we belong."

Walls didn't belong to anyplace growing up. Her father was an itinerant electrician who dreamed of being an inventor; her mother was an occasional schoolteacher who dreamed of being an artist. Both were failures at everything. But they chose to spin their inability to stick to anything as a glorious crusade against bourgeois conformity, and they dragged their kids along for the ride. In her extraordinary book The Glass Castle, Walls describes a childhood spent careering across the country, from California to West Virginia, in a succession of ever more rattletrap cars, in pursuit of increasingly implausible get-rich-quick schemes. "We were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly fun adventure," she writes.

It is heartbreaking to watch Walls and her three siblings try. When her father takes her to the zoo, he has her reach into the cheetah's cage to pet it. One year, with no money for Christmas presents, he has her just pick out a star in the night sky: "We laughed about all the kids who ... got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys."

They live off popcorn, cat food, margarine mixed with sugar, crates of cantaloupes that fell off a train and worse. "Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," her mother asks her hungry kids, with glittery-eyed logic, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?" Finally they fetch up in a tiny, tilting, unplumbed house in the Appalachians. "'It's good we raised you young 'uns to be tough,' Dad says. 'Because this is not a house for the faint of heart.'"

Walls, who is a gossip columnist, is a dead-on, dry-eyed portraitist, both of others and of herself. She writes without a drop of self-pity, and she never makes the mistake of allowing her parents to become monsters: they're always flawed yet recognizably human, desperately trying to be themselves and instead destroying everyone around them. The book takes its title from her father's dream house, a fanciful transparent mansion powered by solar energy that he sincerely seems to believe he will one day build. He never does construct his Glass Castle, of course, but we can be grateful and relieved that Walls survived to create hers. o