Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson Review

17 year old Natalie is becoming an adult. Before setting off to college, she attends a disastrous party and then finds herself increasingly isolated and fraught in her new surroundings. That is until she meets the mysterious Tony, another outcast at the school - but who is Tony really and what does she want with Natalie?

Shirley Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman, is only slightly better than her first, The Road Through the Wall, though that isn’t saying much as her first novel was utterly terrible. Hangsaman is better because Jackson has pared down the cast significantly. Rather than trying to write an ensemble, she instead focuses on the kind of character she would go on to perfect in her later books: a troubled young woman, socially ostracized, with a secret or two, and emotional/mental problems that escalate as the story goes on.

That said, there’s not much about Natalie and her world that was particularly of interest. She’s introduced as already kinda unbalanced, being interrogated by an imaginary detective for an imaginary crime in her family home (which turns out to be foreshadowing), and she has a weirdly close relationship with her pretentious dad. The denouement of the party was sorta interesting if only for being one of the few eventful things that actually happens in the book!

There’s a theme of sad wives married to dickhead academic husbands that I wonder isn’t autobiographical - Jackson expressing her true feelings in being married to her academic husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman (who was also unfaithful to her). I didn’t like Tony either - I called it immediately and the reveal wasn’t impressive, nor was the ending, which was flat.

Mostly, I was really, really bored reading this. Nothing much happens. The academic couple Natalie befriends were dull, the things Natalie does and thinks are dull, the prose is dull - it’s just a very dull coming-of-age novel. If you’ve read Jackson’s later, much better novels, you can see the foundations for the types of story she would write superbly here, but it’s not enough to recommend Dullsaman even to fans of the author.