‘She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive…’
I got into Shirley Jackson at just the right time after reading both We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House just months before the latter was reimagined by Mike Flanagan for Netflix. Since then, Jackson has had a deserved renaissance culminating in Elizabeth Moss’s wonderful 2020 biopic Shirley. That film is loosely based on Jackson’s continued struggles with writer’s block and a philandering husband during the writing of her first novel Hangsaman. And here it is…
Natalie is a troubled, introverted college student who drifts through life trying to make a connection to the people around her, whether that by her suffocating father, her distant mother, her arrogant college professor, or the other girls on her dorm who Natalie seems to view as a different species to herself.
Things start off pretty straightforward in Hangsaman with Natalie experiencing all the usual growing pains associated with any coming-of-age tale. However, there are moments that a feel a little… off. The letters exchanged with her father are odd and all of Natalie’s exchanges have an ethereal, dreamlike quality. For those familiar with Jackson’s work however, this is all pretty normal.
And then… Tony arrives.
Mentioned in dispatches earlier in the novel, Tony is a brash and free thinking would be companion to Natalie whose appearance marks a stark shift in tone and narrative. Without giving too much away, I had to have a long old think upon concluding Hangsaman, and I’m still not entirely sure what happened. With Jackson however, this is often the whole point. It’s unclear how much of the book is real, and how much is imagined, and it is one Jackson’s great strengths as a writer that it also doesn’t really matter either way. The way that she presents Natalie as someone always on the verge of a panic attack makes Hangsaman a difficult, but compelling read, and one that I won’t forget in a hurry.
Shirley Jackson was an incredible author who lived an astonishing, if rather sad, life, and Hangsaman stands as further evidence of her mercurial genius.