From the Archives: Shirley Jackson
The Road through the Wall
by Shirley Jackson
(Farrar, Straus, 1948)
I had the good fortune to read two Shirley Jackson stories this week, "The Lottery" and "Charles." I even had the good fortune to teach "Charles" to an 8th grade class. I love having an excuse to rediscover old friends. Though I haven't read nearly enough Jackson, I still consider her a friend.
Here's the review of Jackson's first novel, The Road Through the Wall, from the Feburary 21, 1948 edition of The New Yorker. The praise might be left-handed, but the reviewer was dead-on when he calls Jackson's style "a sublte and resourceful instrument."
"Suburban life in America has been so exhaustively catalogued in the fiction of the past twenty years that to select it as the subject for a first novel, as Miss Jackson has done, amounts to an act of daring. Nevertheless, her story, which has to do with the fortunes of a dozen families who live on one block in a small California town, comes off very well. A climax hung on the gruesome death of two children accounts for some of the story's effectiveness, but most of its success derives from the author's style, a supple and resourceful instrument that makes her shopworn material appear much fresher than it is."