Natalie Waite, seventeen years old, from a reasonably well-off family, is preparing to leave for college at the start of this novel. Over the course of several months, we follow her as she moves into a new phase of her life, gradually makes new friends, and starts to become an adult. Except of course it’s a Shirley Jackson novel, and none of that is what actually happens.
It’s been several days since I finished this book, and my brain is still basically a melange of confused dog gifs and shrug emoji. Even before she leaves for college, Natalie’s interactions with reality are questionable. Her interior world seems to consist simultaneously of an awareness of her objective surroundings and a no-less-real (to Natalie) perception of a fictional scenario she has constructed. The result of this is that, when she arrives at college, there’s always a question mark for the reader as to how much of the action is actually happening outside Natalie’s head. This uncertainty is compounded by her overt suppression of a traumatic event that occurs near the beginning of the novel.
Look, it’s probably possible, I guess, to read this book as a straightforward narration of actual events. Even on that level it’s kind of creepy, especially her relationship with her father, a self-important writer and terrible husband, who is giving Natalie private lessons on her prose and is such a dreadfully pompous human being as to be basically self-satirising. A friendship later in the book with a girl named Tony is also particularly concerning if real. Has Natalie found, in Tony, a kindred soul, or is she just the outworking of Natalie’s self-destructive impulses?
Compared with Jackson’s other work, you’d probably have to call this small-s strange: no one is murdered, for instance, though a strain of witchiness still persists. I liked it okay, but my heart still belongs to Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Trigger warnings: implied sexual assault, suicidal thoughts.