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A review by aiffix
The Missing Girl by Shirley Jackson
5.0
Includes The Missing Girl (1957), Journey with a Woman (1952) and A Nightmare, which was among the bunch of unpublished texts found in a barn at the back of Jackson's house in 1997.
The Missing Girl will tell you all you need to know about short story writing: how to give dynamics to the text (start with the action and don't stop), how to bring context and back stories (you only need enough to put colour on your characters' cheeks) and how to end it (better write a lively text with no ending than drag on to a foretold closure). A girl disappears. One night, she slips past her exasperated roommate and she is gone. All efforts are put to find her. But as the search parties fail to gather any form of clue, doubt settles in: who is this girl? Was she ever here? Does she even exist? Shirley Jackson is 41 when she writes this. The text resonates with her own troubles: trapped in an unhappy marriage, struggling with mental and physical health, drinking and abusing prescription drugs (barbiturates and amphetamines), she is said to have become increasingly recluse. The Missing Girl is the story of a girl whom nobody will miss, not even the reader, and the feeling is quite disturbing.
Journey with a Woman is Jackson at her most wonderful. I love it when she writes like that. We follow the journey of a nine-year-old boy who, for the first time, takes the train on his own. His parents send him to visit his grandfather. There is a bit of fear and a lot of excitement in him: for the first time he is left on his own with nothing to do but a pile of comics to read. Any true reader knows that feeling. But his plans are upset when a woman comes to sit next him and starts a conversation. She happens to be delightful and a criminal. The whole text is infused with pure Jacksonian softness and poetry. In the end the woman is taken away from us and we miss her very much.
Nightmare was certainly never intended for publication. It is what its title says: a nightmare. Not the gory kind where blood pours from the walls and bunches of severed limbs fly overhead, not the horrible kind where multi-mouth hairy monstres lurch under beds and around corners, but the anxious, obsessive kind, the kind favoured by Kafka and Hitchcock, where something absurd happens to us and we are unable to escape it. Miss Morgan, a tidy and obedient secretary, is sent downtown by her boss to run an errand. As soon as she sets foot on the pavement, she finds out that she is being targeted by an advertising campaign: a truck follows her everywhere, urging passers-by to 'find Miss X' (she, obviously, is Miss X). Posters and fliers press the message. A whole parade blocks Manhattan to celebrate whoever found her. She cannot escape the chase. In the end...
But short stories do not need to end. It is enough that they have entertained us for a few minutes or an hour. A difficult art in which Shirley Jackson excelled.
The Missing Girl will tell you all you need to know about short story writing: how to give dynamics to the text (start with the action and don't stop), how to bring context and back stories (you only need enough to put colour on your characters' cheeks) and how to end it (better write a lively text with no ending than drag on to a foretold closure). A girl disappears. One night, she slips past her exasperated roommate and she is gone. All efforts are put to find her. But as the search parties fail to gather any form of clue, doubt settles in: who is this girl? Was she ever here? Does she even exist? Shirley Jackson is 41 when she writes this. The text resonates with her own troubles: trapped in an unhappy marriage, struggling with mental and physical health, drinking and abusing prescription drugs (barbiturates and amphetamines), she is said to have become increasingly recluse. The Missing Girl is the story of a girl whom nobody will miss, not even the reader, and the feeling is quite disturbing.
Journey with a Woman is Jackson at her most wonderful. I love it when she writes like that. We follow the journey of a nine-year-old boy who, for the first time, takes the train on his own. His parents send him to visit his grandfather. There is a bit of fear and a lot of excitement in him: for the first time he is left on his own with nothing to do but a pile of comics to read. Any true reader knows that feeling. But his plans are upset when a woman comes to sit next him and starts a conversation. She happens to be delightful and a criminal. The whole text is infused with pure Jacksonian softness and poetry. In the end the woman is taken away from us and we miss her very much.
Nightmare was certainly never intended for publication. It is what its title says: a nightmare. Not the gory kind where blood pours from the walls and bunches of severed limbs fly overhead, not the horrible kind where multi-mouth hairy monstres lurch under beds and around corners, but the anxious, obsessive kind, the kind favoured by Kafka and Hitchcock, where something absurd happens to us and we are unable to escape it. Miss Morgan, a tidy and obedient secretary, is sent downtown by her boss to run an errand. As soon as she sets foot on the pavement, she finds out that she is being targeted by an advertising campaign: a truck follows her everywhere, urging passers-by to 'find Miss X' (she, obviously, is Miss X). Posters and fliers press the message. A whole parade blocks Manhattan to celebrate whoever found her. She cannot escape the chase. In the end...
But short stories do not need to end. It is enough that they have entertained us for a few minutes or an hour. A difficult art in which Shirley Jackson excelled.