THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 2, 1997 TAG: 9701250531
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KATE MELHUISH
LENGTH: 79 lines
JUST AN ORDINARY DAY
SHIRLEY JACKSON
EDITED BY LAURENCE JACKSON HYMAN AND SARAH HYMAN STEWART
Bantam. 388 pp. $23.95.
Shirley Jackson died in 1965 at 48. She is best remembered for her horror tale, ``The Lottery,'' in which the townspeople of a small New England village draw lots each year to see which of their number will be stoned to death - ``Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.'' Among Jackson's other works are the gothic novel The Haunting of Hill House, and the very funny, semi-autobiographical books, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.
Any of these make terrific reading and demonstrate Jackson's mastery as a writer. Jackson, like any craftsman, worked hard to attain that mastery. She wrote diligently nearly every day of her life, and her short stories were published in all of the popular periodicals of the 1940s, '50s and '60s: Harper's, Look, The New Yorker. Just an Ordinary Day collects 54 of these stories, ranging from her college days in the '40s to just before her death.
Two of Jackson's children, Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Stewart, edited this volume. They were afforded the opportunity to introduce some of her material to a new generation of readers when a carton of Jackson's writings turned up in a Vermont barn. This discovery led to researches of long-lost manuscripts in the Jackson archives of the San Franciso Public Library and in the Library of Congress. Some of the works turned up were unfinished; some simply could not stand the test of time.
There's no particular theme to these stories, just superb writing. Tone, mood and subject matter change swiftly but easily, and most of Jackson's characters display plenty of humor. In ``About Two Nice People,'' for example, ``Ellen smiled rather in the manner that Lady Macbeth might have smiled if she found a run in her stocking.'' ``Alone in a Den of Cubs'' has a den mother using hysterically innovative disciplinary techniques to restore order to unruly Scout meetings.
Just an Ordinary Day has its share of thrillers, of course, including two very different versions of ``The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith,'' written years apart. These take off on the Bluebeard legend in surprising ways. ``The Missing Girl'' turns out to be missing only if the reader can be convinced that the girl ever existed in the first place. And ``The Story We Used to Tell'' describes the fate of two young women trapped inside a picture hanging in an enormous old ancestral home.
Some of the stories may seem bizarre, but the characters themselves are not. No matter how eerie the circumstances, Jackson's humor prevails, with frequent flashes of wit and engaging characterizations that can be downright funny.
``The Family Magician'' is told in the voice of a young teen-age boy, whose interests are primarily food and baseball; his widowed mother and flirtatious older sister hover somewhere on the periphery of his attention. Their sprightly housekeeper Mallie conjures all kinds of goodies practically from thin air and ensures the good fortune of each member of the family in a cheerful and satisfying way.
Mallie reappears in a later story, ``The Very Strange House Next Door,'' but the perspective in this tale is from outside the family circle. This time Mallie's magic only serves to frighten the neighbors.
The dark tales in the collection have a nightmarish quality, chilling rather than horrific. In ``Home,'' a playful young wife moves into an old house and is delighted at first to stumble across a pair of ghosts; fortunately she's a real fast learner. Only the book's last story, called ``The Possibility of Evil,'' offers a genuine sense of wickedness. A seemingly sweet elderly lady takes it upon herself to comment on the potential for wrongdoing among her neighbors, wreaking havoc for the townspeople and finally for herself.
No matter how fantastic these fables - and a volume that opens with a college girl and the devil having a cozy chat in (where else?) the smoking room of a women-only dorm, must be expected to weigh pretty heavily in imagination - they are always satisfying. Slice-of-life tales that are distinctly other-worldly in flavor.
Jackson's children selected works that tap the very broad range of her craftmanship. Even better, their choices demonstrate with certainty that Jackson wrote as much to entertain herself as her readers. MEMO: Kate Melhuish is a former bookseller who lives in Norfolk.