Hangsaman

Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson, Katherine Howe, Khristine Hvam, Francine Prose

The talented Natalie Waite is about to start her college career at the exclusive woman's school of her father's choice. Her father is a writer and professor and has been instructing Natalie in how to behave as an artist, dismiss her mother, and remain under his influence. She is ready to escape, but her path isn't going to be easy. Highly sensitive, Natalie is ill-prepared for claustrophobic campus life and has nobody to confide in.

'Hangsaman' brings you into the consciousness of its main character like no other Jackson novel. Her later novels were more powerful, but the line between Natalie's personal mind-games and her paranoia, as well as the narrator's authority on events, vanishes. This novel necessitates close reading in the future, in the meantime, I have a lot of unanswered questions.

It takes a long time to grow up and, as I've been finding out in the last few years, it takes a long, long time to adjust to the reality of it. The freedom offered by striking out on your own, even in a contained world like a college campus, is hard to deal with even if you're not dragging baggage, and Natalie, as you'll find, has a lot of it. This was the last of Jackson's works - other than miscellaneous story/essay collections - that I've read, because its plot summary was the most innocuous. 'Hangsaman' is not just a story about a girl having a hard time in college. Neither is it a traditional thriller or horror novel. Reading it was an exhausting experience as it brings back all those insecure moments and pitfalls when you realize that you're not as prepared for life as you (and those previously responsible for you) had hoped.

So, go ahead, the novel is as bizarre and funny and creepy as you'd expect from a Jackson book, but I don't know if I enjoyed it.