Review 43: The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

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.

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