Shirley Jackson (1916–65) was a complicated woman—a hardworking faculty wife and mother of four and a productive writer both energized and enervated by a macabre sensibility that doubtless worsened the poor health that led to a fatal heart attack in her 49th year.
A college graduate, and the spouse of prominent academic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Jackson had profitably immersed herself in what Poe called the literature of the grotesque and arabesque—and seems to have quite enjoyed describing herself as an accredited and devoted practitioner of the dark arts.
And, as if H.P. Lovecraft had had a little of Erma Bombeck or Carl Hiaasen in him (a not unpleasing thought), she also produced charmingly funny accounts (in Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages) of the joys and frustrations of tending to a large, fractious family.
This rigorously selective yet perfectly satisfying gathering of Jackson’s best work begins with the complete contents of her seminal 1947 collection The Lottery. Almost every reader conversant with modern fiction surely knows its sui generis title story: a virtually reportorial, resolutely unemotional account of an annual ritual—presumably a sacrifice of sorts—observed in a remote yet seemingly ordinary New England village. Revealing any further details would be a crime punishable by…well, just read the story.
Other well-mannered bloodcurdlers include “The Daemon Lover,” which introduces the recurring character of James Harris (not a character in this story, as it happens), who’s either an unprincipled Lothario fond of charming lonely women, then blithely breaking their hearts, or an authentic visitor from Hell, bursting with romantic-erotic menace (he’d scare the bejesus out of today’s cute vampire teenagers).
Also, “The Witch,” about a voluble four-year-old boy’s encounter in a train car with a grandfatherly sadist; and, among 21 late-career “Other Stories and Sketches,” an anecdote in which Death, having assumed a pleasing shape, pays an unexpected visit to a lonely woman (“The Rock”); a story which gives a “fortunate” niece “The Little House” owned by her late aunt (who has vacated it, but may still “possess” it); and a memorable black-comic distillation of the ambiguities of good and evil as incarnated by a respectable suburban couple (“One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”).
Also included are Jackson’s superb 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, wherein a member of a ghost-hunting team discovers that the eponymous mansion has been awaiting her arrival; and the final completed novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the story of an insular family trapped in a nightmare that provides both sanctuary and raison d’être for the book’s deeply unconventional, quite possibly insane young narrator.
Parents and children, spouses and relatives, neighbors whose “normality” masks their disturbing complexities, relationships that promise then withdraw perfect happiness—the stuff of everyday life, rendered in plain colloquial prose whose homely accents wring puzzlement, fear and incipient madness from the simplest quotidian experiences. Here was Shirley Jackson’s world, and her unpretentious artistry made of it a fearful yet irresistible place to visit. Witchcraft indeed.
—Bruce Allen
Pub Date: May 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59853-072-8
Page Count: 828
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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