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 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 4: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I Love Dick is a book whose title feels like a deliberate trick to make you aware of other people looking at you when reading it on a train. I’m certain that it will have been a publishing decision to catch the eye. I look forward to seeing the same publisher’s follow-up hits, Eat All Puppies and I’m Not Racist, But… Publishing chicanery aside, ILD is, in its through-line, about a woman who develops a mostly one-sided infatuation with a man called Dick (get it? The title was a phallusy). But it’s an indirect plotline, with plenty of other ruminations about gender, art, politics and more thrown in too. “Plotline” may not be quite the correct term to use, given that the basis for the book is essentially autobiographical, and it reads like a memoir in the clothes of literature – or possibly the other way around. You’re certainly aware that these are real people being discussed, none more so than the author, Chris Kraus, who brings her whole self to bear on the page, with all the m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 33: The Veiled Woman by Anaïs Nin

Okay, so it’s basically my own fault for not properly researching what I was reading. I knew of Anaïs Nin as a writer of fiction and essays, so when I picked up this slim volume of short stories, I thought little of it. But as it turns out, she also wrote erotic literature. I’ve reviewed quite a few graphic novels during this 100 Book Year, but this is my first set of graphic short stories. And by graphic , I don’t mean it has pictures. I took this to read this on the train, and as my misconception became clearer, found myself regularly glancing anxiously at the woman next to me in case she could read the content of the page I was on and now considered me a Public Transport Pervert. It’s important to consider these stories in their proper context. Nin, a complex and controversial character, wrote mostly in the 1940s within a circle of mostly-male literary elite, and sought to find her place at the lead of it. She’s widely considered ground-breaking in the West as a woman writ...
Post a Comment
Read more