As an exhausting semester comes to a close, and as I read of others whose exhaustion has knocked them flat, I am, I have to say, somewhat disinclined to continue my regular routine of posting frustrating and infuriating stories about higher education administrators who, in one way or another, just don't get it. There is an inexhaustible supply of such stories. And even though they are the subject of this blog, there are times when I find it all too exhausting for words. I'll get over it, just as soon as I've had some rest. But in the meantime, I'll recommend some restorative reading.

I recently re-read Shirley Jackson's final and finest novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I first read this book when I was sixteen, sitting by a pool, on a family vacation. It didn't strike me much one way or another at the time, and I quickly forgot all about it. But I found that I was reminded of it by Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I also recently re-read. I thought it was funny how one book could remind me of another book I didn't remember, and wanted to find out what the association was--if any--that my mind was making. I'm glad I did. I answered my question--the similarities between the books are astonishing, and have as much to do with a certain elegiacally eerie tone they both possess as with their broadly similar plots about women whose distaste for convention leads them to choose lives as outcasts. But I also discovered a marvelous gem of a book by a writer who has been virtually forgotten, and who is remembered, when she is remembered at all, for a single story that owns the dubious distinction of being a permanent fixture on the high school English syllabus: "The Lottery."

"The Lottery" has always stayed with me--unlike We Have Always Lived in the Castle--because the older I get, the more I see it played out in real life. Jackson's story of a town that ritualistically stones a random citizen each year is a damning and dead-on metaphor for the uglier inevitabilities of collective life, and I've seen similar, if less physical, stoning take place over and over during the years--families do it, communities do it, workplaces do it, and academe most certainly does it. "The Lottery" is a hell of a parable about how communities need scapegoats. But it's also only part of the larger story Jackson was telling with her work. We Have Always Lived in the Castle describes the life of a family of outcasts from the perspective of the outcasts themselves, and as such it is less interested in why ostracism occurs than in why some people might choose to embrace the fact that they have been cast out. If "The Lottery" has the feeling of a parable, We Have Always Lived in the Castle reads like a fairy tale in which the ultimate happy ending can only happen when you have alienated everyone so much that they will finally leave you alone.

There is a rare purity and simplicity about Jackson's prose in this little novel. The language is clean and consistent in tone, even though the story is utterly strange and bizarre in affect. The effect is not to make one feel that one is being given a window into a mad psychological world whose rules differ from our own--though the narrator clearly is not quite "right"--but rather to convey the wonder of living beyond convention, of having the freedom to cherish what one values while dispensing with everything--and everyone--else. Jackson's is necessarily a world that has no problem with a little tactical murder now and then, and as such her portrait of individual liberty is a disturbing one. But it's magical nonetheless, with a purity of expression and a clarity of purpose that both make her work wonderful and, I suspect, tells us something about why it has been conveniently forgotten.

Here's the opening:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf, they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf. We rarely moved things; the Blackwoods were never much of a family for restlessness and stirring. We dealt with the small surface transient objects, the books and the flowers and the spoons, but underneath we had always a solid foundation of stable possessions. We always put things back where they belonged. We dusted and swept under tables and chairs and beds and pictures and rugs and lamps, but we left them were they were; the tortoise-shell toilet set on our mother's dressing table was never off place by so much as a fraction of an inch. Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.

Highly recommended.

jackson is a forgotten master. her collection _the lottery and other stories_ is filled with great tales. _the haunting of hill house_ is also great.

she was a master of creating the mundane horror of relationships gone awry. "got a letter from jimmy" is worth a look (found in _the lottery_).

bravo, erin.

sorry to sound like a fanboy, but jackson was amazing and i think she's a victim of the canon wars.

I LOVE We Have Always Lived In the Castle! I loved it when I was a girl and I've given it as a gift over and over. My daughter loves it too.

It's so creepy! Julian never mentions Merricat, or addresses her, and you don't really notice until you realize that he thinks she's dead. And she and Constance take that in stride. The terrible guilty secret that Constance and Merricat share - and the whole village think they know it but they're wrong.

I think that at the end they're like sibyls living in a ruined shrine, in their draped tablecloths that must have looked very Greek. The villagers are afraid of them, and from fear and guilt they bring food offerings. "He didn't mean it, please." One could imagine the stories that would grow up around those girls as they get old, as the villagers pass along the responsibility of providing for them. Looking at it that way, the book becomes the story of how that shrine with its demigoddesses came to be. As with "The Lottery", the veneer of civilization is very thin over the reality that humans haven't really changed since prehistory.

"The Lottery" -- I'd have sworn I'd never heard of it, and that Shirley Jackson was the mother on The Partridge Family, but of course I've read that story and every American my age has. (Do they still assign it?)

I can see why it's a junior high staple, as it has the obviousness of Lesson that is accessible to even the dullest eighth grader. But the purity of its writing (as opposed to "Nobody dast blame this man!" and similar sludge) is just chilling.