Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Jeannette Walls
288 pages,
hardcover: $26.
Scribner, 2009.
In some respects, Lily Casey Smith, the heroine of Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, is a classic example of an independent, hardworking Western woman: a rancher, schoolteacher, businesswoman, wife and mother. Lily, however, is in the unique position of being both the author’s fictional narrator and her real-life grandmother.
Walls establishes Lily’s grit in the opening scene: As a 10-year-old, the eldest daughter of a ladylike mother (given to fainting spells) and a dreamy Texas rancher (invested in peacocks and Great Danes), she saves her brother and sister from a flash flood by pushing them up into the branches of a cottonwood. During a flood two years previously, Lily chose bailing over her mother’s praying. ” ‘To heck with praying!’ I shouted. ‘Bail, dammit, bail! ‘ “
Lily is equally ready to bail herself out of binds. She goes to Chicago, becomes a maid and a student and gets married, but when she finds out her husband is a bigamist, she chews him out and leaves him. Later, remarried and a mother, she sells hooch from her backdoor to make ends meet.
Lily’s adventures and the events of her lifetime — the advent of automobiles and airplanes, the Great Depression, world wars, the changing status of women — are worth recounting. It’s clear that Walls is proud of her family, the subject of her earlier memoir, The Glass Castle. Unfortunately, Half Broke Horses feels half-finished. The story suffers from a lack of tempo; it never rises above a series of linked adventures and events to become a completely satisfying novel.
In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster concludes that music and fiction achieve beauty through “expansion.” The risk in writing a novel based on an ancestor’s life (Walls was 8 when Lily died) is that the author’s memories constrict the narrative.
In a few places, Walls successfully fleshes out her recollections. At one point, Lily’s unmarried, pregnant sister comes from Los Angeles to stay with her in Arizona. Describing their final morning together, Lily’s usually tart voice becomes tender, and when she sees Helen “dangling from a rafter, a kicked-over chair beneath her” we see her, too, and are equally stunned.
In the epilogue, Walls has Lily say she feels “a powerful connection” to baby granddaughter Jeannette, the future author: “That little critter grabbed (my finger) and held on like she’d never let go.” Walls has continued to cling to Lily, holding on so tightly that she doesn’t leave room for a fictional world to expand and fill the reader’s imagination.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The limits of memory.
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