1916: Jackson: Hangsaman

My review.

In her introduction to the edition I read, Francine Prose calls this book "strange" (she used to teach a course on Strange Books). It is not only strange, but creepy too, and the boundary between reality and imagination is so fluid I often wasn't sure what was really taking place and what was only happening in the troubled 17-year-old mind of the protagonist, Natalie Waite.

The reader meets Natalie as she is on the verge of heading off to a progressive women-only college selected for her by her pompous, overbearing writer father. But in the first part of the novel she is still at home, given writing assignments critiqued each morning by her father and lectured to about the futility of happiness in marriage by her depressed, defeated, and somewhat alcoholic mother on the occasion of her father throwing yet another cocktail party for his friends and "friends." One of the guests at that party lures Natalie into the woods and something sexual does or doesn't happen -- the reader doesn't know. All the time Natalie is living at home she also has an ongoing conversation in her mind with a police detective who suspects her of murder.

In the second part of the novel, Natalie is at college, which gives Jackson the opportunity to skewer the pretensions of this particular type of academia -- professors (all male!), students (and, oh, there are some sweetly vicious ones), and the decor and rituals of dorm (house) living. Natalie fails to make friends, although two "popular" girls make use of her eagerness for friendship, and she becomes interested in and friendly with the wife, a former student only four years older than her, of her English professor. She resists going home, but does for Thanksgiving, and notes that through all her letters home only her mother realized how lonely she was, not her father.

The third part of the novel is utterly confounding, as Natalie returns to college part of the way through the Thanksgiving weekend and meets up with her one friend, a girl named Tony. They may or may not have a sexual relationship. Indeed, as they spend a day in the local town and then take a bus that winds it way out of town, I must confess I couldn't tell whether Tony was real or a figment of Natalie's fevered imagination as she struggles with a psychological breakdown.

For this book, as far as I can tell, is really about what is going on in Natalie's mind, and it is in someways a "typical" adolescent mind and in some ways a deeply troubled one. At one point Natalie imagines the houses and people at the college being dollhouses filled with dolls that she can pick up and take apart and crush. There's a lot that's creepy in this book, and very little that is told outright, starting with Natalie's relationship with her father and the imagined conversations with the detective, continuing with the way students go in and out of other students' rooms secretly, and winding up with the strange friendship with Tony. There's a lot that's symbolic too, from Natalie enjoying time in the garden at the beginning of the novel, then being lured under some trees by her father's guest at the cocktail party, and finally winding up lost/abandoned in some woods.

I am really not sure what to make of this novel, and have little idea of what was real and what was not, but Jackson is a brilliant writer. She pinpoints the foibles of her characters, satirizes the pretensions of the college, and gets inside Natalie's head in an uncanny way. The last section is so strange but so compelling that I could barely put the book down, even though I was totally mystified. I would definitely be interested in knowing what other readers think about this book.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is inside the head of seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite, an imaginative, lonely girl who has just finished high school and is about to leave for college. At the beginning of the book Natalie is living at home with her father, mother and older brother. Her father is a writer, pompous, self-satisfied and obtuse, who treats his unhappy wife as an inferior and encourages his daughter to share his contempt. Every day, Natalie's father sets her a writing task and critiques her work, often insultingly, but the narrative in Natalie's mind confuses her. She has committed an unspecified crime, and the police are interviewing her. She leaves for a women's college, where her fellow students are self-absorbed, judgmental conformists. The narrative in her mind continues.

Hangsaman's conclusion is a puzzle. Will Natalie be the victim of the one girl she thought was her friend? Does this friend exist, or is she a figment of Natalie's imagination? I thought that Natalie's friend, Tony, was a figment of her imagination and represented the self-destructive part of Natalie.

This is the fourth of Jackson's books that I have read. The writing, as usual, is wonderful. She never writes a pedestrian phrase. Jackson just sees the world differently, and describes what she sees clearly and imaginatively. Like the villagers in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the suburban neighbours in The Road Through the Wall, the people surrounding Natalie, with the exception of her ineffectual mother, are cruel, hypocritical conformists who destroy anyone who is different. Jackson's world is frighteningly real.