FICTION REVIEW: Jackson, Hangsaman

So this is a sharply observed novel about a young woman's first semester of college. It is also, I think, although I'm sure interpretations vary, a novel about a demon lover. (The back jacket copy of the omnibus I got out of the library says it is about her descent into schizophrenia.)

Natalie Waite is seventeen; her father is a writer (it's never quite clear WHAT it is he writes, although I'm guessing literary criticism of some sort more so than fiction or poetry). He is assiduously grooming Natalie to become a writer herself (although Natalie seems to write nothing except letters and her diary, so I'm not sure what kind of writer he expects HER to be). He has carefully chosen the college to send her to (and it's very clear that she is SENT, rather than going) and chosen it deliberately because it does not offer a first class education (Jackson is so very snide about the college's "progressive" ideals that I don't think you could argue it ISN'T based on Bennington College, where her husband was teaching at the time.) and his idea of what a person needs to become a superior adult seems to be that you have to go to college, but not in order to learn anything. (I like Mr. Waite, but I think he is incredibly harmful--although you could argue that that's only because I disagree with him.) So Natalie is sent to college, where she fails to make friends because she is shy and awkward and an ugly duckling who has been put down in the middle of, hey, a bunch of ducks. (Mr. Waite ALSO chose this college deliberately because he knew Natalie would be miserably out of place there--like I said, I think he's incredibly harmful.) This middle-ish section of the novel was funny and painful at the same time, because Natalie's thought processes when trying to figure out how to have a conversation with another person are eerily similar to my own.

Then Natalie meets a girl named Tony. Tony is the Perfect Friend, with whom Natalie almost instantly has a friendship so close that she never has to analyze what she's supposed to say next or how she's supposed to act. (The girls on Tony's floor clearly think Natalie and Tony are lesbian lovers; Jackson conveys beautifully the closeness of what I believe has been called a romantic friendship: they sleep together in the same bed and comb each other's hair and are generally utterly at home in each other's space--but it isn't sexual.) In the grip of this friendship, Natalie starts skipping all her classes and stops worrying about what other people think; she and Tony are a charmed circle of two.

And then Tony takes Natalie out to a deserted amusement park in the rain and the dark and . . . changes. This is where the back jacket copy ("schizophrenia") and I ("demon lover") diverge. It's clear that Tony isn't entirely . . . I tried "real" and that was wrong, I tried "human" and that was wrong. Tony, the Perfect Friend, the Demon Lover, is clearly someone Natalie made up (the Perfect Friend is also of course the Perfect Enemy, because no one on Earth knows you as well, or knows all your weaknesses)--but, because I'm a horror writer, I don't think that that necessarily means Natalie is insane. (This is something Jackson plays with in her short stories, too.) Tony is someone other girls on campus can see and interact with; she has a room in a different house than Natalie's; she clearly has at least some objective reality. But that doesn't mean that Natalie didn't create her.

I don't know. (My suspicion is that the subtitle of this post ought to be "Shirley Jackson is smarter than I am.") Much as with The Road through the Wall, Hangsaman is a novel in which very little happens until suddenly there's a major catastrophe, so there isn't a lot to hang interpretation on. I am baffled by many things, starting with the title and the epigraph. (I do get the relevance of "Green Grow the Rushes O": one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.) There's the thief in Natalie's dorm, and Natalie's terrifying encounter with her, which has absolutely no follow-through of any kind, unless you count the fact that at the end of the scene, Natalie meets Tony. (At first I thought the thief WAS Tony, but I reread and could see that I was wrong--except that I may have been just a little bit right.)

I get that the novel completely shifts gears when Natalie meets Tony because Natalie ceases to be interested in anything that is !Tony, and thus characters like the Langdons and Anne and Vicki simply get left behind, and Natalie's family become an obstruction to her rather than a refuge. (And, you know, that's pretty accurate for someone's first semester in college anyway.) So the part where it doesn't hang together may be a bug or a feature. Or it may be that it DOES hang together, and I just don't see it, as this article suggests. (The writer is spot-on in describing the experience of reading Hangsaman as falling forward into darkness.)

(Google also tells me that Jackson based the novel loosely on the disappearance of Paula Jean Welden. This doesn't help.)

So I understand some things about Hangsaman, but not others. And maybe that's the best I ought to hope for.