HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel
Jeannette Walls
Scribner
Autobiographical Fiction
ISBN: 9781416586289
Jeannette Walls, like her contemporaries Mary Gordon and Mary Karr, has lived a life of unfathomable pain and tragedy, yet has managed to use the hurt as inspiration for great literary works. THE GLASS CASTLE --- her memoir of growing up in a most unconventional family --- was transcendent in style, wit and unimaginable honesty, and dealt with things that would horrify most people, like passing a homeless woman on the streets of Manhattan and realizing that that is your mother. I don't know how you top that kind of revelation.
The reality is that you don’t. Walls as a writer threw her personal lot into that book, but now she turns instead to the stories --- real and imagined --- of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Through the prism of Walls’s imagination, she tells the story of Grandma Lily’s rough-and-tumble life on the prairie. With expected and forgivable comparisons to Laura Ingalls Wilder, Walls makes HALF BROKE HORSES an easy-to-read literary adventure. Imposing a gonzo hindsight to the process, she takes stories she says she remembers her grandmother telling about her life (Walls was eight years old when Lily died) and either reinterprets them or adds on to them, making for some very high drama in a number of places and some engagingly relatable “un-drama” in others. She puts herself as the writer feet first into Lily's mind, soul and body, and does the writing from there --- hence, the "fiction" part of the book.
Like most good New Journalism adherents, Walls offers this account in first person, completely putting her readers in Lily’s position and telling the stories of HALF BROKE HORSES in a conversational tone that makes you feel like you're sitting on a porch somewhere with a cool drink and an even cooler companion. The stories during the Depression --- when Lily gave birth to her children and times everywhere were beyond tough --- make expected and indelible marks on the reader, perhaps creating the most impact in all the book’s different eras.
However, the first Christmas lights on the ranch, the one-room schoolhouse in which Lily taught, and her visceral response to hearing the news about Hiroshima click with the reader in a way that makes you feel as if you are living through these times yourself. Walls is so good at depicting clear human emotion in the most exacting and economical terms. She's a ridiculously talented writer and uses this half-truth/half-fiction conglomeration to thrilling and ecstatic literary effect.
In the sequence when Lily and soon-to-be-husband Jim first realize that they are going to get married, Lily has two requests: “The first is that we've got to be partners. Whatever we do, we’ll be in together, each sharing the load…and the second is, I know you were raised a Mormon, but I don’t want you taking any more wives.” Jim responds, “Lily Casey, from what I know of you, you’re just about as much woman as any man can handle.” Truer words were never spoken. Long live Lily and this literary feast of prevailing against all stormy conditions: weather, prejudice, wartime, loss of trust, love and death.
HALF BROKE HORSES is that rare thing --- an inspired look back that raises a real-life heroine back from the dead with style, wit and determination, and makes a spot for her in American history. A real ripping yarn!
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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