Skip to main content

Review 43: The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Lottery and Other Stories
I didn’t quite know what to expect from Shirley Jackson. I feel like she’s often put into the thriller category, but if you encountered her alongside John Grishams and P.D. Jameses, I suspect you’d consider her misplaced. Mostly, though, I only knew it from a brief mention on The Simpsons, shortly before Homer throws the book into the fireplace. I know, I know. This is what you get from Broken Britain’s education system.

Imagine my delight, then, to find that The Lottery and other stories is a collection of carefully-crafted short story gems. Turns out that people enter the literary canon for a reason. Who knew?

Jackson’s stories have a clear theme running through them of propriety and conformity. She tackles these from lots of different angles – judgemental mothers, anxious homeowners, murderous communities. These are all brilliantly polished, mostly viewed from the perspective she knew best – city life in 40s and 50s America.

There’s a clear focus on gender here too, with the hypocrisies and dual expectations that are levied at women by their wider society carefully dictating their actions and responses. Jackson does this subtly, through the women’s mannered reactions to their situations, but the gathering weight of this sense across the bulk of the stories gradually makes itself very powerfully felt.

The book’s title story, The Lottery, is actually quite a departure from the style of her other stories, but it’s perhaps the clearest representation of what she’s saying in most of them. Social violence, and acceptance of it, is drawn in stark lines; everyone agrees it’s fine, when it’s not happening to them. It’s all the more powerful for its continued relevance today.

Jackson herself, while she spent time in New York and San Francisco that undoubtedly influenced her writing, was quite a reclusive woman. Ultimately it feels like she’s perhaps a little distrustful of society – and with the diamond-sharp insights she picks out in these stories, it’s hard to disagree.

--

This is my forty-third book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 40: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders

Earlier in the year, I read Mary Roach’s Gulp - a fascinating and hilarious journey down the alimentary canal. When picking up Giulia Enders’ Gut , I worried that I might be over-gutted. What more could I possibly have to learn, having already read one other book? Fortunately, Ender’s bestseller couldn’t be a better companion piece to Roach’s. Where Gulp is a light-hearted set of the facts that she found most interesting, Gut goes and fills in more of the hard detail. Both are immensely readable, but the former is set to entertain, and the latter to inform. They complement perfectly. Enders (and let’s not forgo the cheap mention of nominative determinism here) makes you fall in love with the gut by being in love with it herself. Her passion and joy blast out of every sentence, and like so many things discussed within the book, that’s infectious. Sometimes the writing style feels slightly young, but I think that’s to make it engaging to a wide audience, and is easily over...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 46: The Problem that Has No Name by Betty Friedan

It's odd when people hark back to the 1950s as a golden time, as though everything today were on an ever-descending spiral into depression, violence and selfie sticks. You may notice that those who are on a hark-hop tend to be white, straight, male, or any combination thereof. This is probably because to be a white, straight man in 1950s America was to have an absolutely corking time, relatively speaking. It’s a bit like watching Darth Vader bemoan the fact that, since the Death Star got blown to bits, there are too many ewoks about and the rebel alliance has no respect for you anymore. The process of losing dominance is painful for the dominant class. Don’t worry, though, straight white men! There’s still a hell of a way to go before we reach equality, so you can keep living it up right now. Anyway, Betty Friedan’s The Problem That Has No Name is a lucid and powerful selection of essays from her larger The Feminine Mystique , the seminal feminist text that underlines the probl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 37: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has got dystopian speculative fiction down . She probably gets up in the morning and chomps on a huge bowl of Dystopios, washed down with a hot cup of speculation. In fact, she's got it so down that in The Heart Goes Last , one of her more recent offerings, the premise feels almost throwaway. It's not that it's not fully-considered, or incomplete - Atwood's world-building is as jam-hot as it ever was. It's more that it feels like she can slot it together with such ease that shocking elements don't even shock her anymore. There's real darkness in this story, but the tone across the book is much lighter than on some of her other works, and that can serve to jar a little. The premise is that society has crumbled (natch) and an authoritarian new semi-socialist system has arisen to combat the cultural rot ( mais oui ). In this, people spend half their lives voluntarily in prison (A.K.A. Positron), and the other half out of it (in Consi...
Post a Comment
Read more