Hangsaman

Reading Hangsaman, it's easy to see why Shirley Jackson is so widely celebrated as a prose writer. She has an acerbic wit, but her voice is always kept subordinate to the characterisation of the protagonist. She writes beautiful descriptions, but only so far as required by the story. It is this combination of natural talent and control that imo sets Jackson apart as a writer.

Hangsaman is, ultimately, a coming of age story centered on the protagonist, Natalie's journey from home, to college, to self-discovery. Jackson's signature motifs of paranoia, repressed saphic desire, and all-encompassing patriarchical oppression are very much in effect.

Natalie is far from a 'perfect' victim, however: she is no Tess. She is deluded, egotistical and misanthropic; and the bracing honesty of her characterisation prevents the text from ever descending into polemic. Hangsaman is cold cynical realism all the way down.

It's dark, it's scathing, it's funny. I recommend.

#books #reading #ShirleyJackson

Thanks to the other Goodreader who posted the edition of this book that has a noose and horrified girl's face on it; it is hilarious and has zero to do with the novel. Not that my 2013 edition is perfect—there's not a drop of blood in this book—but it is at least more subdued.
As most know, Shirley Jackson wrote the chilling, enigmatic short story, The Lottery, which was published in the June 26, 1948, edition of the New Yorker. That story was a simply told one, and it might make you think she was just a one-hit writer without much more to say.
Not so. Jackson has an intellect as great at Mary MacCarthy's, and Hangsaman is, as Francine Prose's very good introduction to the 2013 edition puts it, is about "how the mind reacts to, adjusts, embraces, or recoils from experience."
You may hear that it was based on a true story, that of a Bennington College sophomore who went missing in 1946, never to be found, but that was only the germ of Hangsaman. This is not a "ripped from today's headlines," Joyce Carol Oates kind of novel.
It goes deep, so deep that the last section is quite surreal. I must read those pages again.