Hangsaman in The Roundtable

Jun 02, 2017 Christopher rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, american, fiction

Edited 3/2/18 to his some spoilers.

This has the feeling of a midcentury classic to me; it feels like something a character on Mad Men would read. It's a subtle, vague, mindbending thing full of ennui, and I think it's Shirley Jackson's most complex novel. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is perfect in its simplicity. The Haunting of Hill House is frightening in its single-mindedness. Hangsaman, however, is beautiful in virtue of its untidiness.

Hangsaman is a puzzle with several pieces missin Edited 3/2/18 to his some spoilers.

This has the feeling of a midcentury classic to me; it feels like something a character on Mad Men would read. It's a subtle, vague, mindbending thing full of ennui, and I think it's Shirley Jackson's most complex novel. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is perfect in its simplicity. The Haunting of Hill House is frightening in its single-mindedness. Hangsaman, however, is beautiful in virtue of its untidiness.

Hangsaman is a puzzle with several pieces missing, which may frustrate some readers, but for me it felt like a breath of fresh air. It showed a broader range to one of my favorite authors, while still hitting all the right notes of Jackson's best work. Ambiguity is no stranger to Jackson's writing—take the ending of The Sundial, in which (view spoiler), or We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in which (view spoiler)—but the symbols and metaphors in this book were thrown well beyond ambiguity into the realm of the insane. (view spoiler)

At its heart, though, this is a story about a strange, lonely girl who is having trouble growing up, who is trying to get past a trauma, who has an overbearing father who refers to himself as God, and who—like the reader—doesn't have any answers to her many questions. A story can get away with extreme ambiguity if it treats its characters with love and respect, which is something Jackson never has a problem doing.

P.S. A couple more things...

I think Shirley Jackson suffers from being marketed as horror or "terrifying" or with covers that depict nooses surrounding the protagonist or the protagonist being pursued by a sinister-looking group of white-cloaked individuals. "Her shattering novel of a young girl led ever deeper into total terror", one cover claims. "The story of a haunted, brooding young girl trapped in a sinister world of her one making", another says.

Shirley Jackson is most well known for The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, which are both pretty messed up stories that could easily be called "scary". But Shirley Jackson is not a horror writer. The majority of her work has a dark twist to it, but none of her books are really trying to actively scare you. They may unsettle you, or cause you to look at the people around you differently, but the gothic horror mold people try to squeeze her into (especially in her one time; Penguin seems to have straightened out her covers, and therefore her image, somewhat recently) isn't suiting.

P.P.S. I felt connections between this book and David Lynch, and that's the first time that's happened. Certainly the ambiguity and weirdness of the images from this book helped that connection: the man with one arm, the imaginary detective, the lesbian overtones and implied sexual violence. And just the fact that it forces you to continue to think about it after you've finished. ...more

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Mar 16, 2017 Elise rated it liked it

Shelves: women, spooky, 1950s, read-in-2017

On a sentence level, this is great--Jackson writes incisive, insightful prose. However, the plot doesn't hang together. There are hints that the story we're given isn't real at all but a hallucination, a mental escape, and that's exciting, but that undercurrent surfaces too rarely to be satisfying, and we're left with long uninterrupted stretches that are just an unhappy teen's miserable college experience. ...more

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