Classics corner / The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson / Review

Classics corner

Short stories

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson – review

Stephanie Cross

Sun 16 Jan 2011 00.05 GMT

T

he title story might be the one for which Shirley Jackson is famed but, as this volume suggests, it was not entirely typical of her oeuvre. First published in 1948, "The Lottery" details a long-established rite that culminates in murder. Elsewhere, however, Jackson aims to disquiet rather than shock: the threat is often latent in Jackson's work,as Donna Tartt has observed. The weird farming community of "The Lottery" seems likewise anomalous: Jackson's protagonists tend to be mothers, or women starting their homemaking careers.

Born in San Francisco in 1916, Jackson spent her married life in small-town Vermont (the hostility that she and her Jewish husband experienced there is said to have informed "The Lottery"). But among the highlights here are her depictions of mid-century New York. "Pillar of Salt", for instance, masterfully evokes the mental breakdown of a New Hampshire wife while on a trip to the city: "The people seemed hurled on in a frantic action that made every hour forty-five minutes long"; the children, with their toy tills and miniature telephones, seem like "hideous little parodies of adult life". Meanwhile, in "Elizabeth", the inadequate partition walls of a New York office come to stand for the wider disappointments and shams of the title character's existence.

There is sparkling comedy in this collection, as well as glimpses of Jackson the horror novelist: indeed, the two are combined in "The Witch" and "The Renegade", both stories that capture the gleeful bloodthirstiness of the young. But there are also subtle studies of disillusionment and snobbery – Jackson is a sympathetic, penetrating observer of the domestic mundane – and, most notably in "Flower Garden", of racism.

Some short stories snap shut like traps – not Jackson's. Nevertheless, the way that they slide into place seems equally fated and final.

THE GUARDIAN