Shirley Jackson The Lottery and Other Stories.

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories, is published by Penguin Classics.  That can mean the book is quite old. It does seem to be, with the stories I’ve read so far being set in post-Second World War America, or it could mean a guarantee of quality. An imprint that says - this is really good.

    The book is in five sections, with short stories in each section. I’ve finished section one and started on section two. My feeling was of claustrophobia. This was small town American life squeezed between the pages. In the opening story, ‘The Intoxicated’, for example, a drunk is at a party. He knows his way around the house, but is taking a breather from all that merriment and the daughter of the party-giver, half his age comes and sits with him. That’s the story, more or less. I was waiting for more.

The second story ‘The Daemon Lover’ is good. If I had a big red marker pen in my hand I’d give it a B1+.  Janine, at the beginning of the story, is getting married that morning. She’s fussing over what she’ll do and what she’ll wear. The narrative lets us know that her intended thinks she’s thirty, when in fact, she’s thirty-four years old, a virtual spinster of the parish. The morning rolls on. He doesn’t turn up. By afternoon she begins looking for him. He’s not there, but he’s a step ahead of her. She follows the path of where he might have been and ends up where he might be. Ambiguity is the key.

In ‘Trial by Combat’ Emily Johnson is staying in a room house. Small things, like a nickel-and-dime hatpin,  from her room keep going missing. She thinks she knows the culprit, but goes at it obliquely. She asks the elderly woman that lives downstairs ‘Mrs Allen’ for her advice. Mrs Allen explains that all the keys in their rooming house are old-fashioned. They can open each of the doors in the rooming house. When Emily Johnson is found with her hand in one of the drawers of Mrs Allen’s room she has some explaining to do. I liked this one. The way it panned out.

Some of the other stories I didn’t like. I’m guessing that ‘My Life With R.H.Macy’ is autobiographical.   The narrator is asked ‘I’m in lingerie, what are you in?’ The story is an extended motif explaining why she’s not really in anything and she’s not really just another number. How ridiculous to think that way. Good idea. Shite story.

Too many of the stories I’ve read so far don’t do much for me. I’ve got to ‘The Renegade’ and won’t be plodding any further.

http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole