Even with kids home, I have plenty of time to read during quarantine. This morning I finished Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson. Hopefully you’re familiar with Jackson from the many adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House. Hangsaman is an earlier novel and much more odd and experimental in style.

The novel doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s more a set of scenes in the life of Natalie Waite, connected by Natalie’s fears and fantasies. On the surface, Natalie is a shy girl with literary ambitions who goes off to a fancy liberal arts college and struggles to find her place in a world that seems pretty shallow and sad. Beneath the surface Natalie is deeply troubled, with increasingly violent fantasies and some deep sexual trauma that she can’t admit even to herself. (If you’re sensitive to realistic discussion of sexual trauma, stop reading here.) We get hints as to what that trauma might be, but since Natalie’s inner world is so confused we can’t be sure what really happened.

In the beginning it’s heavily implied that Natalie is assaulted out in the woods by one of her father’s friends, but as this incident echoes through the novel we realize this might not have literally happened. Natalie has an odd, maybe incestuous relationship with her father and the “incident in the woods” might just be a symbolic way of processing a much larger trauma. Whatever the details, Natalie just can’t seem to process that and figure out college at the same time.

Some people find this intimate view of Natalie’s breakdown quite dark, spooky, and even thrilling. I found it interesting but couldn’t really get caught up in it. It was a fascinating and kind of depressing look at 1950’s marriage and young womanhood before feminism really shook things up, and Natalie’s sexual trauma and confusion were heartbreaking, but the mental breakdown aspect didn’t work very well for me. This is billed as a gothic novel but it’s really a mix of biting social commentary and deep psychology. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you love 1950s experimental fiction or Shirley Jackson. I do like both those, so this quick read was worth it for me, but as a gothic novel I give it one haunted star.