hangsaman (shirley jackson)

Hangsaman is one of those books that reward in the reflection as much as the reading. It’s a quasi-surreal tome which tells a story from the POV of a late teen woman-girl, Natalie, which veers between comic description of college life to nightmarish passages which intimate rape and psychological breakdown. The novel takes place at Natalie’s home, dominated by her rarefied, pseudo-intellectual father, and at the college where she is sent to. In the college she is both the odd one out but also the observer, whose ability to describe the absurdities and cruelties of college life permits Natalie the breathing space she needs to survive. This is a weird book, coming out of the suburban backwoods of post-war USA, hanging the strange Lynchian dirty washing on the line for the reader to gawp at. It’s Lolita told from the other side, where the psychological damage of people’s actions and the world’s hypocrisy flowers on the protagonist’s strange skin.