I'm sorry, Miss Jackson

Shirley Jackson frightens me. Not just because she wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which had me on such an edge that when a truck ran over a pothole outside our window, my husband had to peel me from the ceiling fan. No. Shirley Jackson frightens me because her view of humanity is so dim, and I can't help but fear that she actually might have it right.

The Road Through The Wall is the story of Pepper Street, a road just outside of an estate somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco, inhabited by those on the verge of a lifestyle they have always dreamed of, but find just out of reach. The lives of the Pepper Street residents unfold in bursts of dialogue - like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," the topic at hand is often spoken of only in hints and whispers. We discover that Pepper Street is filled with Rockwell families through the looking-glass - a boy who sits in the closet of his rich neighbor, reciting all the dirty words he knows; a high school dropout divorcee who works as a maid and tries to seduce her boss; a girl who is both feared and emulated by her peers for her cruel gestures; a mother who forces her daughter to burn her journals of poetry in the fireplace because she was caught writing "filthy" love letters to the neighbor boys. It all feels very "Welcome to the Dollhouse."

Lion Books obviously tried to spin a sordid adultery angle to my 1950 pulp paperback copy of the book with its cover art and the tagline "a married woman prowls the back streets," (completely hilarious given that this is perhaps a half a page out of the entire book - I can tell who Lion was trying to sell to) but this book is more about the children, and I haven't encountered such evil and picked-on children in literature since Lord of the Flies. It saddens me to realize that Jackson too was likely picked on, obviously pouring a bit of her own story into the character of Harriet, the aspiring writer who is teased by her peers and the parents because of her weight. The climax, as shocking and brutal as it should seem, doesn't feel so out of place, knowing what Jackson believes about the nature of mankind.

Somebody hand me a smiling baby, please.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.