the lottery and other stories by shirley Jackson

Times Literary Supplement 29 January 2010

Shirley Jackson’s admirers include Joyce Carol Oates and Donna Tartt, two writers who share her sharp prose. This is on display in this collection which bears the title of Jackson’s best-known story, first published in 1948. There is a succinct contradiction in almost every phrase, a turn which nags away at the reader; such is her skill, that the careless will come in for a nasty shock. Jackson is adept at creating a sense of the uncanny in conventional situations. A young wife feels “irrevocably connected with something dangerously out of control: her car for instance, on an icy street”, after a mild social embarrassment. The suffocating atmosphere of suburban Cold War America is palpable here; the young wives commit faux pas that in their worlds could prove disastrous. Although her protagonists often seem to be suffering from a serious degree of disassociation, we are made to feel that we too would feel adrift in these restrictive scenarios. In “The Daemon Lover”, a young woman seems to conjure a fiancé who will marry her that day but whom she cannot locate; in “Pillar of Salt”, a wife finds herself so adrift in New York that she is no longer able to cross a road on her own; and in “Tooth”, another young wife is so disorientated by a dental operation that she cannot recognize her own face in a mirror. There is humour, and an appetite for the macabre; dismemberment is a recurring theme, but the violence only becomes explicit in “The Lottery”, in which a woman is chosen by lot to be stoned to death. There is nothing gaudy about this; it is simply another warning to us not to sleepwalk through our lives. Jackson said that she hoped “to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives”.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement