Monstrous acts and little murders, page 2
it doesn't require a personal connection to the town, however, to be stirred by the news that two of Jackson's children have rescued a box of lost story manuscripts and brought them together with previously uncollected stories to create "Just an Ordinary Day," the first new book of Jackson's fiction since just after her death. For a core of dedicated readers, Jackson's memory is very much alive. Is it faint praise to call her a writer's writer? I know so many writers who'll hurry to stores for this book, too impatient to put it on Christmas lists. They'll be impatient with reviews, too, wanting to delve into the book, which more than doubles the number of Jackson stories ever in hard covers, and find their own favorites. Jackson's fans tend to be fiercely proud of her, and a little protective. To read her at all is to have a personal connection. To put it most simply, Shirley Jackson wrote about the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community and sometimes even in a single mind. She wrote about prejudice, neurosis and identity. An unfortunate impression persists (one Jackson encouraged, for complicated reasons) that her work is full of ghosts and witches. In truth, few of her greatest stories and just one of her novels, "The Haunting of Hill House," contain a suggestion of genuinely supernatural events. Jackson's forté was psychology and society, people in other words — people disturbed, dispossessed, misunderstanding or thwarting one another compulsively, people colluding absently in monstrous acts. She had a jeweler's eye for the microscopic degrees by which a personality creeps into madness or a relationship turns from dependence to exploitation. Judy Oppenheimer's fine 1988 biography of Jackson is called "Private Demons," but it could have been called "Little Murders." She's also terribly funny. Her observations are dry, her dialogue shockingly fresh and absurd, and her best stories can make you think of a collaboration between James Thurber and a secular Flannery O'Connor. She reaches that height perhaps nine or ten times in the fifty-five stories and pieces in "Just an Ordinary Day." I'd point newcomers to "The Mouse," a horrible, gem-like exhibition of her mastery of nuance and implication; "Nightmare," where a secretary gets swept up into a woman-on-the-street promotional scheme in one of the very best of her dark parables of capitalism; the quietly hardboiled "On The House;" and the widely anthologized but uncollected classic of good Samaritanism gone bad, "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts," especially. The direly strange "My Uncle in the Garden" is like a glimpse into a horrific animated snow-globe; "A Great Voice Stilled" manages to squeeze the astringent satire of a Muriel Spark novel into four pages. "The Missing Girl" is also unskippable, a hypnotic distillation of the principle of the invisibility of victims, reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith. For these stories alone the book is worthwhile — for longtime converts, for anyone. To my eye the other forty-odd stories, while valuable for enriching our sense of Jackson's genius, fall short of her standard, albeit in different and interesting ways. It's disconcerting, after all this time, to find Shirley Jackson an inconsistent writer. However chaotic her life became, she was always obsessively meticulous in what she published, and when Hyman organized a group of uncollected stories for the posthumous collection "Come Along with Me," he was meticulous on her behalf. In contrast, there are stories here that start like classics but misfire or wind down and a few endings that tend to the arch or pat. It was famously said of Jackson that "she never wrote a bad sentence," and that's still true. But I'm afraid her shelf now includes six or eight regrettable, clumsy pieces. We also learn that Jackson, like Fitzgerald, occasionally turned out a story for commercial magazines that demanded "uplift" — couples meet; lonely women blossom; unwished pregnancies are embraced. In these, Jackson, who was always proud of her professionalism and productivity, seems not so much to have betrayed her vision as to have laid it expediently to one side. They're deft, funny and perfectly unsatisfying. I'd trade a hundred of the competent romantic pieces here, such as "About Two Nice People" or "Dinner For a Gentleman," for one or two more like "Portrait" and "Before Autumn" — unresolved, gnomic experiments I know I'll reread many times, if never fully fathom. The family tales are another matter. However overtly droll, her autobiographical writing always turns on the contest for identity (for parent and child) that was her deepest subject. "All I Can Remember" and "Fame," two little fables of self- deprecation which elegantly bracket this collection, are perfect examples. In "All I Can Remember," Jackson plays a terrible moment — the rejection of her earliest writing attempts by her parents — for laughs. Then it ever-so-slightly deepens, as Jackson decides "never, as a matter of fact, to write anything ever again. I had already decided finally that I was never going to be married and certainly would never have any children. It may have been about that time that I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do." We know, of course, that she married, raised a family and wrote, but "Just an Ordinary Day" reminds us that Shirley Jackson also went undercover, never flinching from the darkest clues she might find, and that in her stories and novels she remains on the trail, of herself, her neighbors, all of us. Jonathan Lethem's novel "As She Climbed Across the Table," will be published by Doubleday books in March, 1997. |