Monday, November 28, 2005
Booklist II
'Shirley Jackson's American Gothic', by Darryl Hattenhauer, is a really, really good piece of criticism on the major works of Shirley Jackson, who I have a new obsession with that was set off by James Harris in the collection 'The Lottery, or the Adventures of James Harris'. See American Nerd for full details.
'Gothic' begins with a really insightful chapter on Jackson's life, and, my God, how could the woman not be damaged? Apparently her husband, realizing that her stories for women's magazines were keeping them in high style, set regimented work times for her, forced her to do all of the housework, childcare, and driving, as well as signing her up for extracurricular activities so that she wouldn't have time to be depressed. Comparing that with her two longer works on domestic foibles, 'Life Among the Savages' and 'Raising Demons' and you can see places where the fiction and the reality merge. However, the husband in the books never fucks a coed while his wife is in the next room yelling at them.
So far, so good, but I'm only to chapter three.
// posted by Amethyst Vineyard @ 7:07 AM 
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Apropos of nothing, I love Life among the Savages. I keep trying to get people to read it, but, as far as I know, no takers.
I loved both when I read them, and then I felt bad for enjoying them so much because Shirley Jackson hated them and only wrote them for the money. But I don't care! They're so funny and odd. In 'Raising Demons', there is an amazing scene where the narrator discovers that her two younger children have been disappearing into a fantasy world through a magic tree called 'Pudge'. When her daughter describes the tree and what is underneath, the father looks up and says 'Yggdrasil?' because they've unintentionally followed the Celtic creation myth exactly in creating their new world. That's awesome.
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