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Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended.
Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended.
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