I’ve always heard about Shirley Jackson, and while I once read her seminal short story The Lottery, The Road Through the Wall is my first experience with her longer work.
I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction.
An intricately woven study of family dysfunction, The Road Through the Wall paints a picture of a small, affluent neighborhood rotting from the inside out. By itself, the topic is nothing new these days; if you’re a contemporary fiction writer who writes about a wholesome, happy family without any sense of irony, you’re dismissed to la-la land. Dysfunction is something we expect in our culture now, and that smooth shell of a wife that always smiles, a husband whose worst habit is smoking, and children innocent as dolls has long been cracked. So reading about rich, outwardly happy people riddled with desperation and selfishness is hardly shocking.
But even if it’s no longer as startling now as it may have been when first written (1948), it is still completely absorbing. Jackson juggles a lot of characters, shifting between eight families and successfully gives each family (and within it each character) their own unique problems and personalities. She draws the reader into this world of sunshine and hypocrisy, exploring the differences and similarities between the ritualistic cruelty found in the neighborhood children and that which is found in their parents.
There isn’t a true plot in this story; instead, Jackson takes the reader through characters’ troubles as they happen. One family moves out. A new one moves in. Part of the wall that encloses the neighborhood for privacy is brought down to create a pathway. With two exceptions at the very end, the events that happen are very mundane, yet they drastically affect the entire neighborhood, a sly indication of just how closed and rigid are the lives of these families.
Rating: A.
