On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

Jeannette Walls writes memoirs (The Glass Castle) that read like novels and novels (Half-Broke Horses) that read like memoir. Her new book, The Silver Star (Scribner, digital galley) is billed as fiction, but the first-person narrator, 12-year-old Bean Holladay, sure resembles the young Walls of The Glass Castle. Living in California with her 15-year-old sister Liz, Bean is pragmatic about her emotionally unstable mother, Charlotte, a free spirit if there ever was one. When sometime-actress Charlotte fails to return home from one of her frequent out-of-town trips “to find herself,” Bean and Liz flee social services, buying bus tickets for Byerly, the Virginia hometown Charlotte fled long ago.
Widower Uncle Tinsley, an eccentric hoarder of sorts, is surprised by the girls’ arrival, but they soon settle into the dilapidated family home and the routines of the little mill town that the ’60s bypassed. Bean finds out about her dead father and makes friends. Lovely Liz has a harder time, especially when the bullying mill manager takes a special interest in her and Bean. Then Charlotte blows into town, planning to take the girls to New York City, and the girls’ loyalties are divided and tested.
Walls can set a scene, nail an emotion, spin a good story, but, despite references to integration and the Vietnam War, she casts Byerly in the sepia glow of older, simpler times. Plucky Bean comes off like Scout Finch’s cousin, and Charlotte’s ready-made for a Tennessee Williams play — or a Jeannette Walls’ memoir.
The premise of Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel Sisterland (Random House, digital galley) sounds enticing — psychic identical twin sisters all grown up — but Kate and Vi turn out to be quite ordinary, at least from narrator Kate’s point-of-view. The devoted wife of a university professor and the mother of a toddler daughter and infant son, Kate wants to be as normal as possible. She’s frustrated that flamboyant bisexual Violet, who ekes out a living as a professional psychic, can’t be more like her. The two have gone in decidedly different directions since a middle-school slumber party, which is revealed in flashback along with other past turning points like starting school or going to different colleges.
In the here and now of 2009, Vi has announced to the world that an earthquake is going to devastate St. Louis, and Kate has a strange dream that supports Vi’s prediction. But Sittenfeld is less interested in the validity of ESP than in describing the fractures and fissures in Kate’s relationships with her nearest and dearest — Vi, her odd parents, husband Jeremy, neighbors Courtney and Hank.
The book is as intimately voiced and observed as Sittenfeld’s Prep or An American Wife, but Kate’s determination to sandpaper the edges of her character makes her dull as dishwater. I kept wondering how Vi would tell the story.