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Shirley
“[A] totally explosive thriller starring the fascinating late author.” —Entertainment Weekly
Best known for her short story “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson is an endlessly fascinating figure whose chilling tales of psychological suspense are still widely read and taught around the world. In this darkly captivating novel, Susan Scarf Merrell uses the facts of Jackson’s life as a springboard to explore the 1964 disappearance of Paula Weldon, a young Bennington College student. Told through the eyes of Rose Nemser—the wife of a graduate student working with Jackson’s husband, Bennington professor Stanley Edgar Hyman—Shirley reimagines the connections between the Hymans’ volatile marriage and one of the era’s great unsolved mysteries.
Best known for her short story “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson is an endlessly fascinating figure whose chilling tales of psychological suspense are still widely read and taught around the world. In this darkly captivating novel, Susan Scarf Merrell uses the facts of Jackson’s life as a springboard to explore the 1964 disappearance of Paula Weldon, a young Bennington College student. Told through the eyes of Rose Nemser—the wife of a graduate student working with Jackson’s husband, Bennington professor Stanley Edgar Hyman—Shirley reimagines the connections between the Hymans’ volatile marriage and one of the era’s great unsolved mysteries.
288 pages, Paperback
First published June 12, 2013
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3207 people want to read
About the author
Susan Scarf Merrell
3 books30 followersSusan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, which is soon to be major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. Other books are the novel A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel-editing program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of TSR: The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 295 reviews
March 2, 2020
Thoroughly exceeds expectations! Shirley Jackson is an author of legendary talent, and I'll admit to being hesitant about having anyone tread on such sacred ground. Have no fear! This story weaves Jackson's biography into a tale that's nearly as Gothic as one of her novels. Astonishingly, it makes Shirley an even more intriguing figure than I could ever imagine. Some critics argue that it depicts her too negatively, but I disagree. She could be a very disagreeable person, by all historical accounts, and to show her without these flaws would be a far worse tragedy.
I've not read Susan Scarf Merrell before, but I'm instantly in love. Her prose is gorgeous, the characterization fantastic. She's clearly a Shirley nerd, and that makes me love her even more. Fans will find numerous references to Shirley's works, but you don't have to be a scholar to get all the references. I would recommend reading Raising Demons, The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery & Other Stories minimum before going into this though. Not because you have to, but because you will get a lot more out of it.
I've not read Susan Scarf Merrell before, but I'm instantly in love. Her prose is gorgeous, the characterization fantastic. She's clearly a Shirley nerd, and that makes me love her even more. Fans will find numerous references to Shirley's works, but you don't have to be a scholar to get all the references. I would recommend reading Raising Demons, The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery & Other Stories minimum before going into this though. Not because you have to, but because you will get a lot more out of it.
February 9, 2015
Shirley Jackson is like Jane Austen: she only lived to write six novels and she died in her forties, leaving the tantalizing beginnings of a novel unlike any other she'd written. Both authors have shelves of their very own in my apartment, because I have multiple editions of everything they ever wrote as well as lots of books about the writers and their work.
Austen is the greater writer of the two, but I have to say that Jackson is my favorite. Not just of the pair, but of all time. Austen taught me to read; Shirley Jackson made me think I could be a writer.
So of course when I saw this novel about her, I was conflicted. I wasn't sure I wanted to read it, but I felt as if I had to, if only so I could tear the author a new one if she screwed up portraying my Shirley.
I'm a cranky old lady when it comes to novelizations of the (fairly) recently departed. Historical figures don't bother me, because nobody can know what they were really like, so such novels are obviously purely speculation; but when, for instance, all those novels about Sylvia Plath came out, I want to have a head-smacking party. (Other people's heads, not mine.) I mean, her kids were still around when those were written, you know? And her kids were in those novels. Being potty-trained, in one instance. I'm fascinated by Plath too, but that's just rude.
(Told you I was a cranky old lady on the subject.)
Really, though, I'm not just being righteous for the sake of the poor wittle children. That sort of novel just strikes me as presumptuous. Where do you get off thinking you're the one who knows what it was like to be Plath? Especially when, if you know anything at all about her, you know she was ferociously prickly and proud. She would hate to be the subject of such a project.
Shirley Jackson, on the other hand...given her sense of humor and her catlike self-assurance, I'm not sure she'd mind this kind of novel at all. I can imagine her ghost answering such a summons – leaning against the kitchen counter, smiling and lighting an incorporeal cigarette. Think you know me, do you? Well, by all means, have at it!
Susan Scarf Merrell keeps a respectful distance from her subject, and it works. Although the book is called Shirley, the main character is entirely fictional – Rose Nemser, who is 19 and pregnant when she arrives at Jackson's house. Her husband Fred has just become a teacher at Bennington College, where Jackson's husband Stanley Edgar Hyman is a popular professor. The Nemsers are boarding with Jackson and her family until they can find a place of their own, but very quickly everyone wants the arrangement to be a more permanent one.
I don't want to talk much about the plot of this novel, partly because it's a largely character-driven work and partly because it's the writing that smacked me over the head and dragged me off to its lair. I will say that anyone who knows anything about Shirley Jackson will understand immediately that this novel is set in the last year of her life, though she was only in her forties, and that Merrell really captures something about Shirley Jackson.
Merrell has also clearly read the eff out of Jackson's work. She knows her stuff, and she also knows how to weave this knowledge into her writing rather than bludgeoning the reader with it. I think her only blunders are early in the novel, where she treats Stanley as a sort of biographer of his wife who spouts paragraphs about The Famous Writer:
"Hill House," I murmured, thinking of the novel in my purse. It occurred to me then that I'd never seen evidence before this of how a novelist constructs a world from fog and fact.
Stanley smiled approvingly but shook his head. "Shirley will show you the one everyone thinks is that house. Perhaps it is; perhaps it isn't. She claims a house in California as the source. The wise man would wager that Hill House came straight from her imagination."
Stanley Edgar Hyman was a brilliantly odd duck by all accounts, but I don't think anyone talks like that.
Or like this:
"James Harris is folklore's proof that man has never been trustworthy. We're not alone in our preference for that ballad; it's Shirley's favorite as well. D'you know, her book The Lottery and Other Stories was supposed to be subtitled The Adventures of James Harris?"
Well, not exactly. First of all, see above re nobody talks like this. And second, the book in question was subtitled The Adventures of James Harris, originally. I have a 1949 second edition, and it says it right there on the cover. The subtitle fell away in later editions, but it was there at first. Stanley would have said "used to be," not "was supposed to be."
As you can see from the four stars I gave this book, these are minor quibbles. I was updating constantly as I read, because the prose is so gorgeous I had to share. Rose is haunted long before she meets Shirley Jackson, and Merrell perfectly captures this sense of a lost young woman seeking a mother only weeks before she herself becomes one.
She also captures a sense of Shirley Jackson herself:
She was in the kitchen, leaning against the sink with the water running. Yesterday's dress again. A cigarette trailing smoke. Her hair caught up in a limp ponytail. She was watching something out the window, staring intently.
...and of the time, so recent yet so unlike our own – a time when you went to the supermarket and told the clerk what you wanted and he went and got it for you, as Jackson uses to memorable effect in her story "Just Like Mother Used To Make" and her far creepier novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle:
When we got to the market, Shirley had already called; the chops were cut and the string beans and potatoes had been set aside. We took a container of milk, and some apples, and a bag of farina, as she'd asked the grocer to tell us.
...a time when men were men, and women were cute and decorative and useless:
We'd not talked about whether I would work, Fred and I. His mother never had; she was pretty and helpless and hardly knew how to open and shut the windows in their apartment. Her job at the store was little more than a social position, a way of visiting with her friends, keeping an eye on their children. Fred's father – most of the fathers I knew, my own the sole exception – would have been embarrassed if his wife had to contribute to ongoing expenses. A wife could work for something specific; if she wanted to buy new furniture she could take a job in a department store and reap the discount, without shame. Though most of the women I knew had been forced to work on and off over the years, no one ever talked about it.
Merrell also understands, and expresses, the kind of work and sacrifice it takes to be a great writer:
"It takes more than wanting," she said cruelly. "You don't have the language. You don't want to share. You hoard your past. You clean it up. Withhold the details that make you what you don't want to be."
..."You change your stories all the time – you do, you've told me so yourself!"
"I clean them up to make them read better. I don't care what the hell I look like, or anybody else."
And she knows how to be spooky as hell:
My mother. A slivered moon night, that part of winter before the snow has fallen, cold hits the body like a shock and we are outside, my fingers frozen, and those are her limbs by the crumbling stucco wall: her arms, her legs swept into a pile by some insane and diligent gardener. Her eyes are closed; her mouth is peaceful. I want to wake up, I admit it, I'm not ashamed. Wake up. Wake up! I tell the truth, confess it here: Momma, I saved myself instead of you.
That's chapter fourteen in its entirety, and it represents the tone and content of this novel perfectly.
I don't know if this is the kind of novel that will make people unfamiliar with Jackson's work run out and read it, or if you should read some of Jackson's stories and novels first and then read this. I can say that if you enjoyed the understated terror of such novels as Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House, you will enjoy this book.
Austen is the greater writer of the two, but I have to say that Jackson is my favorite. Not just of the pair, but of all time. Austen taught me to read; Shirley Jackson made me think I could be a writer.
So of course when I saw this novel about her, I was conflicted. I wasn't sure I wanted to read it, but I felt as if I had to, if only so I could tear the author a new one if she screwed up portraying my Shirley.
I'm a cranky old lady when it comes to novelizations of the (fairly) recently departed. Historical figures don't bother me, because nobody can know what they were really like, so such novels are obviously purely speculation; but when, for instance, all those novels about Sylvia Plath came out, I want to have a head-smacking party. (Other people's heads, not mine.) I mean, her kids were still around when those were written, you know? And her kids were in those novels. Being potty-trained, in one instance. I'm fascinated by Plath too, but that's just rude.
(Told you I was a cranky old lady on the subject.)
Really, though, I'm not just being righteous for the sake of the poor wittle children. That sort of novel just strikes me as presumptuous. Where do you get off thinking you're the one who knows what it was like to be Plath? Especially when, if you know anything at all about her, you know she was ferociously prickly and proud. She would hate to be the subject of such a project.
Shirley Jackson, on the other hand...given her sense of humor and her catlike self-assurance, I'm not sure she'd mind this kind of novel at all. I can imagine her ghost answering such a summons – leaning against the kitchen counter, smiling and lighting an incorporeal cigarette. Think you know me, do you? Well, by all means, have at it!
Susan Scarf Merrell keeps a respectful distance from her subject, and it works. Although the book is called Shirley, the main character is entirely fictional – Rose Nemser, who is 19 and pregnant when she arrives at Jackson's house. Her husband Fred has just become a teacher at Bennington College, where Jackson's husband Stanley Edgar Hyman is a popular professor. The Nemsers are boarding with Jackson and her family until they can find a place of their own, but very quickly everyone wants the arrangement to be a more permanent one.
I don't want to talk much about the plot of this novel, partly because it's a largely character-driven work and partly because it's the writing that smacked me over the head and dragged me off to its lair. I will say that anyone who knows anything about Shirley Jackson will understand immediately that this novel is set in the last year of her life, though she was only in her forties, and that Merrell really captures something about Shirley Jackson.
Merrell has also clearly read the eff out of Jackson's work. She knows her stuff, and she also knows how to weave this knowledge into her writing rather than bludgeoning the reader with it. I think her only blunders are early in the novel, where she treats Stanley as a sort of biographer of his wife who spouts paragraphs about The Famous Writer:
"Hill House," I murmured, thinking of the novel in my purse. It occurred to me then that I'd never seen evidence before this of how a novelist constructs a world from fog and fact.
Stanley smiled approvingly but shook his head. "Shirley will show you the one everyone thinks is that house. Perhaps it is; perhaps it isn't. She claims a house in California as the source. The wise man would wager that Hill House came straight from her imagination."
Stanley Edgar Hyman was a brilliantly odd duck by all accounts, but I don't think anyone talks like that.
Or like this:
"James Harris is folklore's proof that man has never been trustworthy. We're not alone in our preference for that ballad; it's Shirley's favorite as well. D'you know, her book The Lottery and Other Stories was supposed to be subtitled The Adventures of James Harris?"
Well, not exactly. First of all, see above re nobody talks like this. And second, the book in question was subtitled The Adventures of James Harris, originally. I have a 1949 second edition, and it says it right there on the cover. The subtitle fell away in later editions, but it was there at first. Stanley would have said "used to be," not "was supposed to be."
As you can see from the four stars I gave this book, these are minor quibbles. I was updating constantly as I read, because the prose is so gorgeous I had to share. Rose is haunted long before she meets Shirley Jackson, and Merrell perfectly captures this sense of a lost young woman seeking a mother only weeks before she herself becomes one.
She also captures a sense of Shirley Jackson herself:
She was in the kitchen, leaning against the sink with the water running. Yesterday's dress again. A cigarette trailing smoke. Her hair caught up in a limp ponytail. She was watching something out the window, staring intently.
...and of the time, so recent yet so unlike our own – a time when you went to the supermarket and told the clerk what you wanted and he went and got it for you, as Jackson uses to memorable effect in her story "Just Like Mother Used To Make" and her far creepier novel We Have Always Lived In The Castle:
When we got to the market, Shirley had already called; the chops were cut and the string beans and potatoes had been set aside. We took a container of milk, and some apples, and a bag of farina, as she'd asked the grocer to tell us.
...a time when men were men, and women were cute and decorative and useless:
We'd not talked about whether I would work, Fred and I. His mother never had; she was pretty and helpless and hardly knew how to open and shut the windows in their apartment. Her job at the store was little more than a social position, a way of visiting with her friends, keeping an eye on their children. Fred's father – most of the fathers I knew, my own the sole exception – would have been embarrassed if his wife had to contribute to ongoing expenses. A wife could work for something specific; if she wanted to buy new furniture she could take a job in a department store and reap the discount, without shame. Though most of the women I knew had been forced to work on and off over the years, no one ever talked about it.
Merrell also understands, and expresses, the kind of work and sacrifice it takes to be a great writer:
"It takes more than wanting," she said cruelly. "You don't have the language. You don't want to share. You hoard your past. You clean it up. Withhold the details that make you what you don't want to be."
..."You change your stories all the time – you do, you've told me so yourself!"
"I clean them up to make them read better. I don't care what the hell I look like, or anybody else."
And she knows how to be spooky as hell:
My mother. A slivered moon night, that part of winter before the snow has fallen, cold hits the body like a shock and we are outside, my fingers frozen, and those are her limbs by the crumbling stucco wall: her arms, her legs swept into a pile by some insane and diligent gardener. Her eyes are closed; her mouth is peaceful. I want to wake up, I admit it, I'm not ashamed. Wake up. Wake up! I tell the truth, confess it here: Momma, I saved myself instead of you.
That's chapter fourteen in its entirety, and it represents the tone and content of this novel perfectly.
I don't know if this is the kind of novel that will make people unfamiliar with Jackson's work run out and read it, or if you should read some of Jackson's stories and novels first and then read this. I can say that if you enjoyed the understated terror of such novels as Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House, you will enjoy this book.
July 9, 2020
Several weekends ago I watched the movie Shirley. It’s a good movie, satisfying in a number of ways. But I was increasingly bothered by its pretense that Jackson had no children—who, in real life, were a huge part of Jackson’s life and work. The movie makes no claim at being a biopic, but the children’s nonexistence came to seem, to me, lazy—as if the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to incorporate children in the story they wanted to tell.
I turned to the novel the movie was based on to see how it handled the existence of the children. They’re mentioned almost right away: The oldest is married and the youngest is twelve at its start. (The book covers 1964/5; the movie seems to be set in the late 40s/very early 50s when Jackson in real life would’ve been working on her second novel while taking care of three young children and likely pregnant with the fourth.) In the novel the first-person-narrator’s interaction with the children is limited, mostly used to show her jealousy of their relationships with Shirley.
At the book’s start I wasn’t captivated by the prose, but as I continued it didn’t bother me as much. It’s obvious to this Shirley Jackson fan that the novelist knows her Shirley Jackson too, but that’s not nearly enough for me. I expected there to be more of a reason for the writer’s use of Jackson. I also didn’t understand the point of several of the scenes.
In a nutshell, this book wasn’t for me. I figured it wouldn’t be, but I was curious.
I turned to the novel the movie was based on to see how it handled the existence of the children. They’re mentioned almost right away: The oldest is married and the youngest is twelve at its start. (The book covers 1964/5; the movie seems to be set in the late 40s/very early 50s when Jackson in real life would’ve been working on her second novel while taking care of three young children and likely pregnant with the fourth.) In the novel the first-person-narrator’s interaction with the children is limited, mostly used to show her jealousy of their relationships with Shirley.
At the book’s start I wasn’t captivated by the prose, but as I continued it didn’t bother me as much. It’s obvious to this Shirley Jackson fan that the novelist knows her Shirley Jackson too, but that’s not nearly enough for me. I expected there to be more of a reason for the writer’s use of Jackson. I also didn’t understand the point of several of the scenes.
In a nutshell, this book wasn’t for me. I figured it wouldn’t be, but I was curious.
June 11, 2014
3.5 There is very little dialogue in this story, it is told in narrative style. Our narrator is Rose, telling her story from a 10 yr. distance. A story when she was a young wife and mother, only nineteen years old. She and her husband Fred, who has taken a job at Bennington College, move I to the house of Shirley Jackson and her husband , the professor and literary critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman.
This is a book with an undercurrent of psychological suspense, the house, the family, Shirley herself, and her relationship with her husband, and Rose trying to find herself among all these literary knowledgeable people. The disappearance of co-ed Paula Weldon is at the heart of the story and provides a atmosphere of suspicion.
I have always been a huge Jackson fan, and many details of her writings and the sources of some of her stories provided some of my favorite parts of this book. Her messy home life, her constant drinking and smoking, her forays into spells and witchcraft as well as her high strung personality and breakdowns. She was an amazingly prolific writer, especially when one takes into account her death at the age of 48. I actually stopped to read some of them and have now bought a few of her novels that I had never read, but were mentioned in this book.
Rose and Fred become enmeshed in their house, their lives basically at the whim of the two authors. This is a coming of age story, that mixes elements of stories of Jackson's, such as Hill house, though this house in not malevolent, but seems to provide Rose with some unbelievable dreams. It is here that I feel the story loses a little of its focus, maybe too many different elements mixed together. Still this is a good story, interesting and well written, about some well known literary icons and a young woman trying to find her own path after leaving the strong influence of Jackson and her husband.
This is a book with an undercurrent of psychological suspense, the house, the family, Shirley herself, and her relationship with her husband, and Rose trying to find herself among all these literary knowledgeable people. The disappearance of co-ed Paula Weldon is at the heart of the story and provides a atmosphere of suspicion.
I have always been a huge Jackson fan, and many details of her writings and the sources of some of her stories provided some of my favorite parts of this book. Her messy home life, her constant drinking and smoking, her forays into spells and witchcraft as well as her high strung personality and breakdowns. She was an amazingly prolific writer, especially when one takes into account her death at the age of 48. I actually stopped to read some of them and have now bought a few of her novels that I had never read, but were mentioned in this book.
Rose and Fred become enmeshed in their house, their lives basically at the whim of the two authors. This is a coming of age story, that mixes elements of stories of Jackson's, such as Hill house, though this house in not malevolent, but seems to provide Rose with some unbelievable dreams. It is here that I feel the story loses a little of its focus, maybe too many different elements mixed together. Still this is a good story, interesting and well written, about some well known literary icons and a young woman trying to find her own path after leaving the strong influence of Jackson and her husband.
October 17, 2014
pretty bad and unsatisfying as a psychological thriller + weird in an also bad, gimmicky way as fictionalized imagining of shirley and her family. seems like merrell wanted to write a book in jackson's vein (unreliable neurotic girl narrator) but she unfortunately does not have the same gift for turn of phrase and her attempt to make the jackson home a character à la the haunting does not particularly work. constant inorganic name-dropping of titles from shirley's oeuvre. a fantastic waste of research, imo; imagine being in the library of congress riffling through shirley's papers and only having a web of shit to show for it.
September 22, 2014
(3.5) Flying back from America the other week, I must have started about a dozen different books on my Nook, but none of them ‘took’ until this one. It’s a gently creepy psychological thriller that imagines a young married couple boarding with Shirley Jackson and her husband, Stanley Hyman, while the two men were professors at Bennington College in Vermont in 1964.
Our narrator is Rose Nemser, married and pregnant at just 19. Stuck at home during the days, she observes all the inner workings of this unusual family (apparently Jackson, mother of four, was a closeted lesbian, and Stanley slept with his students) and sneaks peeks at Shirley’s work in progress, once even trying her hand at a pastiche. The dilapidated Hyman mansion reminds Rose of Jackson’s fictional Hill House: “I’d never seen evidence before this of how a novelist constructs a world from fog and fact.” Rose also makes a hesitant investigation into the disappearance of a Bennington student a few years before, and wonders how this real-life tragedy might have been translated into Shirley’s neo-Gothic fiction.
I have a feeling I would have liked this more if I was more familiar with Jackson’s work (I’ve only ever read her short story “The Lottery,” assigned in high school); I might have spotted more allusions or even stylistic nods. As it is, I thought this was a pleasant suspense story, but it tailed off significantly in the last third. The relationship between Shirley and Rose – a mixture of jealousy and adulation – is the most memorable element for me. You’ll certainly be led to wonder how much of this portrait of Shirley Jackson is true to life and how much is Rose’s imagination: “Shirley herself, part creation and part creator, was wisdom and art made manifest.”
[I also loved this self-declaration from Rose, a rare moment of confident expression from a woman cowed into timidity by her family circumstances: “I want to be important, to matter. I want never to worry about money. I want to be free, and happy, and comfortable in myself, and not ashamed.” Those sound like good goals for anyone.]
Our narrator is Rose Nemser, married and pregnant at just 19. Stuck at home during the days, she observes all the inner workings of this unusual family (apparently Jackson, mother of four, was a closeted lesbian, and Stanley slept with his students) and sneaks peeks at Shirley’s work in progress, once even trying her hand at a pastiche. The dilapidated Hyman mansion reminds Rose of Jackson’s fictional Hill House: “I’d never seen evidence before this of how a novelist constructs a world from fog and fact.” Rose also makes a hesitant investigation into the disappearance of a Bennington student a few years before, and wonders how this real-life tragedy might have been translated into Shirley’s neo-Gothic fiction.
I have a feeling I would have liked this more if I was more familiar with Jackson’s work (I’ve only ever read her short story “The Lottery,” assigned in high school); I might have spotted more allusions or even stylistic nods. As it is, I thought this was a pleasant suspense story, but it tailed off significantly in the last third. The relationship between Shirley and Rose – a mixture of jealousy and adulation – is the most memorable element for me. You’ll certainly be led to wonder how much of this portrait of Shirley Jackson is true to life and how much is Rose’s imagination: “Shirley herself, part creation and part creator, was wisdom and art made manifest.”
[I also loved this self-declaration from Rose, a rare moment of confident expression from a woman cowed into timidity by her family circumstances: “I want to be important, to matter. I want never to worry about money. I want to be free, and happy, and comfortable in myself, and not ashamed.” Those sound like good goals for anyone.]
July 8, 2014
OMG, where do I start?
This was on the library's New shelf. I picked it up totally serendipity, not having any idea or preview or trailer or GR's friends' suggestion. Nothing preconceived.
And I'm sure it will make my top 5 this year. Because it is that rare, rare sample of idealism coupled with innocence, art, literary critique, emotional quotient and cerebral concepts in writing- all of that good stuff, squarely hitting the reality of individual human life fan. Worse, the real Academia fan. Far more brutal. It's also writer incestuous. And fancy me LIKING a book of fiction by a writer writing about writers. Known writers and name-dropping in their parleys of characters' dialogs by these famous "home-owners"- myriads of other writers in contrast and comparison. As if I were in the Literary Comparative Studies groups that I so despise in an endless marathon discussion. Yes, I do despise that exact parsing. Half the time it ruins the pleasure in any book for me.
But despite all those negatives (for me but possibly not for you)- this book comes closest to the time and the feel of Feminism base crux. Freidan was wrong. Stanley is right. It's far, far more complex than that Mystique.
Read this book. A different outlook needed more so now, in this exact era, when American woman actually believe they need government and a whining victim voice in order to measure a progress that is positive. How absolutely ironic that it came to that point.
Yes, I have read "Haunting of Hill House" and Shirley Jackson. When I was a very young woman and it was a memorable read. So I did have some concepts about her, the author. WRONG.
If you are a person who loves to read the depressives, like Oates or Plath or any of 50 male authors I could put solidly in or at least close to that category- you might not "get" this book. Nor will many youth who do not know the female directions of more than 40 years ago, nor begin to understand the strengths of that era too. But for those who are also "pragmatic" women- especially you, give this one a try.
Merrell, I will certainly read her again. Masterful writer of the marriage waltz and also a smidgeon/ beginning of understanding and ability to conceptualize female lifestyle conflicts into word actualization of that precise starting spot to where REAL power and independence will arise for modern females.
She may get a literary following. I hope it doesn't spoil her wisdom.
This was on the library's New shelf. I picked it up totally serendipity, not having any idea or preview or trailer or GR's friends' suggestion. Nothing preconceived.
And I'm sure it will make my top 5 this year. Because it is that rare, rare sample of idealism coupled with innocence, art, literary critique, emotional quotient and cerebral concepts in writing- all of that good stuff, squarely hitting the reality of individual human life fan. Worse, the real Academia fan. Far more brutal. It's also writer incestuous. And fancy me LIKING a book of fiction by a writer writing about writers. Known writers and name-dropping in their parleys of characters' dialogs by these famous "home-owners"- myriads of other writers in contrast and comparison. As if I were in the Literary Comparative Studies groups that I so despise in an endless marathon discussion. Yes, I do despise that exact parsing. Half the time it ruins the pleasure in any book for me.
But despite all those negatives (for me but possibly not for you)- this book comes closest to the time and the feel of Feminism base crux. Freidan was wrong. Stanley is right. It's far, far more complex than that Mystique.
Read this book. A different outlook needed more so now, in this exact era, when American woman actually believe they need government and a whining victim voice in order to measure a progress that is positive. How absolutely ironic that it came to that point.
Yes, I have read "Haunting of Hill House" and Shirley Jackson. When I was a very young woman and it was a memorable read. So I did have some concepts about her, the author. WRONG.
If you are a person who loves to read the depressives, like Oates or Plath or any of 50 male authors I could put solidly in or at least close to that category- you might not "get" this book. Nor will many youth who do not know the female directions of more than 40 years ago, nor begin to understand the strengths of that era too. But for those who are also "pragmatic" women- especially you, give this one a try.
Merrell, I will certainly read her again. Masterful writer of the marriage waltz and also a smidgeon/ beginning of understanding and ability to conceptualize female lifestyle conflicts into word actualization of that precise starting spot to where REAL power and independence will arise for modern females.
She may get a literary following. I hope it doesn't spoil her wisdom.
December 30, 2022
3.5, rounded up.
This is a decidedly odd amalgamation of fictionalized biography and psychological thriller that intentionally apes Jackson's own work. It doesn't QUITE work, mainly because of a perhaps too reverent reading of the character of Jackson herself, plus a mystery that doesn't really hold much tension - the conclusion is foreshadowed really before one finishes the first few chapters. It is mainly centered on the narrator's own fascination (she calls it love) for the author, juxtaposed against her somewhat shaky marriage to a protégé of Jackson's husband, who unfortunately follows him into the minefield of infidelity.
While I am not sure she truly captures the Hymans, the prose is quite skillful, it's quick paced, and it is rather a kick that there are cameos by Dylan Thomas and Bernard Malamud, and scandalous gossip about Salinger and Bellows. I (vaguely) remember reading Jackson's domestic comedies (e.g., Raising Demons) as a kid, so it was also fun to re-encounter her progeny in all their mischievousness. I must admit I was impelled to read this due to having seen the trailer for the new film version (which I have NOT seen as yet) - but I have a feeling it veers fairly far from its source, and perhaps does a better job of eliciting some frights.
This is a decidedly odd amalgamation of fictionalized biography and psychological thriller that intentionally apes Jackson's own work. It doesn't QUITE work, mainly because of a perhaps too reverent reading of the character of Jackson herself, plus a mystery that doesn't really hold much tension - the conclusion is foreshadowed really before one finishes the first few chapters. It is mainly centered on the narrator's own fascination (she calls it love) for the author, juxtaposed against her somewhat shaky marriage to a protégé of Jackson's husband, who unfortunately follows him into the minefield of infidelity.
While I am not sure she truly captures the Hymans, the prose is quite skillful, it's quick paced, and it is rather a kick that there are cameos by Dylan Thomas and Bernard Malamud, and scandalous gossip about Salinger and Bellows. I (vaguely) remember reading Jackson's domestic comedies (e.g., Raising Demons) as a kid, so it was also fun to re-encounter her progeny in all their mischievousness. I must admit I was impelled to read this due to having seen the trailer for the new film version (which I have NOT seen as yet) - but I have a feeling it veers fairly far from its source, and perhaps does a better job of eliciting some frights.
June 28, 2020
Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel Shirley is a fun and new way to explore the world of Shirley Jackson. Merrell’s work is extremely well-written and achieves a vibe very similar to Jackson’s own work. I had not heard much about this book before reading it, but I became intrigued in checking it out before the upcoming movie adaptation. Shirley, a novel labeled as a psychological thriller, manages to tell a new and fictionalized tale of mystery while also combining aspects from Jackson’s life and background. If a reader is unfamiliar with Shirley Jackson’s life or work, this novel may be one they will not get as much out of due to references.
The book is narrated by a fictional young woman named Rose Nemser as she and her husband, Fred, move in with and befriend Shirley Jackson and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. At only nineteen years old, Rose is seen as a very naive wife and mother to be, but she has a lot to learn if she hopes to make her way in the world. This is where Shirley Jackson comes in; Rose hopes to be like and learn from her. The two are often left alone together as Fred and Stanley teach at a local college. Despite being opposites, it does not take long for Rose and Shirley to become friends or for Rose to become completely infatuated with Shirley. She seeks her approval and friendship from beginning to end of this story. As Rose recounts her story and their friendship filled with ups and downs, she also notes her growing obsession with the story of a college student, Paula Welden, who went missing years before. With these events at the heart of the novel, Merrell crafts an excellent and enthralling tale.
Since I had not heard too much about this author or her work, I was not sure what to expect. Even then, I did not expect to like this novel as much as I did in the end. The atmosphere that Merrell creates in her story is incredible. You can tell that the author really knows Jackson and her works. I really enjoyed the references to her works. However, I have only read The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, so I am sure I did not pick up on every reference. Based upon what I do know about Shirley Jackson, I think Merrell manages to bring her character to life and shine light on her personality and family life. I am very much looking forward to exploring more of Jackson’s work and learning more about her life, and I can definitely see myself revisiting this book after that.
The book is narrated by a fictional young woman named Rose Nemser as she and her husband, Fred, move in with and befriend Shirley Jackson and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman. At only nineteen years old, Rose is seen as a very naive wife and mother to be, but she has a lot to learn if she hopes to make her way in the world. This is where Shirley Jackson comes in; Rose hopes to be like and learn from her. The two are often left alone together as Fred and Stanley teach at a local college. Despite being opposites, it does not take long for Rose and Shirley to become friends or for Rose to become completely infatuated with Shirley. She seeks her approval and friendship from beginning to end of this story. As Rose recounts her story and their friendship filled with ups and downs, she also notes her growing obsession with the story of a college student, Paula Welden, who went missing years before. With these events at the heart of the novel, Merrell crafts an excellent and enthralling tale.
Since I had not heard too much about this author or her work, I was not sure what to expect. Even then, I did not expect to like this novel as much as I did in the end. The atmosphere that Merrell creates in her story is incredible. You can tell that the author really knows Jackson and her works. I really enjoyed the references to her works. However, I have only read The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, so I am sure I did not pick up on every reference. Based upon what I do know about Shirley Jackson, I think Merrell manages to bring her character to life and shine light on her personality and family life. I am very much looking forward to exploring more of Jackson’s work and learning more about her life, and I can definitely see myself revisiting this book after that.
September 16, 2014
This book was so good I had to keep reminding myself it was a fictional account. I could not put it down. Shirley is a fictional account about a young couple's year living with the author Shirley Jackson, her husband Stanley Hyman and their children.Newly married and pregnant Rose, with her professor husband Fred move into the home of the Hyman's that seems itself to be alive, full of secrets and mysteries. Both become consumed by the couple for different reasons.
A long ago disappearance of a beautiful young student has Rose, and the town, suspicious of Shirley. Because anyone who has such thoughts, write such strange dark stories must be a witch. In the eyes of the community when it comes to Stanley (big, brash, bearded, lusty fellow) who can begrudge the man his flirtations when he is stuck with such an unattractive dark wife. But Rose soon attaches herself to the enigmatic author, wanting to be as important and fascinating as her. Not caring if Shirley hurt the missing student, Rose is consumed with loyalty, love and wanting to get in the mind of her hostess, as easily as Shirley seems to know Rose's every thought and feeling.
We see in Rose a deep hunger for a different life, because she too is escaping her own darkness. As she says "Still, that second life was going to make me matter- it would have needs I could fulfill, would give volume and weight to the hardly noticeable manifestation that was me."
Fred too lusts for the life Stanley lives, all the knowledge and admiration. The two share a bond based on folklore and soon Fred is as enmeshed in Stanley as Rose is in Shirley, each leading to choices that will hurt their marriage. They will both allow these vibrant talented people to seep into their own image and become someone different at the core.
The long marriage between Shirley and Stanley is dissected, along with the interactions between each of their children with their parents. Stanley, regardless of his many affairs seems to need Shirley. He needs Shirley as an anchor, the partner that makes him the interesting character he is. Shirley herself is fascinating, frighteningly astute to the point of mind reading. She seems to have psychic ability, lending itself to the brand of witch. She has a disdain for the locals that is exposed in her story-telling. While she is a strong person, who sees perfectly the ugliness of reality she too has fractures. She buries the many betrayals she suffers at Stanley's hands and at a great cost to her emotional well being.
The young college girls are a constant threat themselves with their youth and freedom to have any life they pick. More than an education, it's the privilege of choices and the constant presence of having a place, people who care if they go missing. As Rose says of her own mother, who lived hard and had nothing "My mother, outside somewhere dark, alone, missed by no one." Shirley calls them the 'harem' and Rose's youth and naivety blinds her to the threat the girls pose to her relationship. But with the all knowing, all seeing intelligent presence of Shirley, Rose will come to know the devil in all things.
Shirley soon becomes Rose's center, but is Rose as vital to Shirley? Shirley's mind isn't one that can be entered lightly nor is hers an easily deciphered soul. Shirley resents Rose's attempts to make a character of her, though everyone in Shirley's life seems to Rose to be nothing but characters she can position at will. From the start she sees Shirley as a kindred, "Shirley's was the smile of a woman like me, the abandoned and the never-loved, it was the smile of the arrogantly insecure." ...the smile of the brilliant person in a woman's body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell.I loved her immediately, I wanted to be her and take care of her." The line about being brilliant in a woman's body and beautiful in an ugly shell is perfection in this novel. Because we see what the struggle to rise above those restrictions does to a woman, how maddening it is that when one reaches success there too follows labels and envy. God help a brilliant, ugly woman in a man's world. This story takes place in the 60's but could just as well hold true for the struggles women face today.
The novel is so beautifully written, and dark only because the ugly side of things seems to infect us, bringing out the devil in us all. It is more than an excavation of marriage and art, it is an awakening. Rose will be fresh and new, like a blossom and the harsh environment of the house, of life itself, will slowly wither her. Wisdom has a high price.
I recommend this brilliant novel to everyone. I love it so very much. This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It isn't often that I am sad when a novel ends, and a story is always best when the characters grow, for better or for worse.
A long ago disappearance of a beautiful young student has Rose, and the town, suspicious of Shirley. Because anyone who has such thoughts, write such strange dark stories must be a witch. In the eyes of the community when it comes to Stanley (big, brash, bearded, lusty fellow) who can begrudge the man his flirtations when he is stuck with such an unattractive dark wife. But Rose soon attaches herself to the enigmatic author, wanting to be as important and fascinating as her. Not caring if Shirley hurt the missing student, Rose is consumed with loyalty, love and wanting to get in the mind of her hostess, as easily as Shirley seems to know Rose's every thought and feeling.
We see in Rose a deep hunger for a different life, because she too is escaping her own darkness. As she says "Still, that second life was going to make me matter- it would have needs I could fulfill, would give volume and weight to the hardly noticeable manifestation that was me."
Fred too lusts for the life Stanley lives, all the knowledge and admiration. The two share a bond based on folklore and soon Fred is as enmeshed in Stanley as Rose is in Shirley, each leading to choices that will hurt their marriage. They will both allow these vibrant talented people to seep into their own image and become someone different at the core.
The long marriage between Shirley and Stanley is dissected, along with the interactions between each of their children with their parents. Stanley, regardless of his many affairs seems to need Shirley. He needs Shirley as an anchor, the partner that makes him the interesting character he is. Shirley herself is fascinating, frighteningly astute to the point of mind reading. She seems to have psychic ability, lending itself to the brand of witch. She has a disdain for the locals that is exposed in her story-telling. While she is a strong person, who sees perfectly the ugliness of reality she too has fractures. She buries the many betrayals she suffers at Stanley's hands and at a great cost to her emotional well being.
The young college girls are a constant threat themselves with their youth and freedom to have any life they pick. More than an education, it's the privilege of choices and the constant presence of having a place, people who care if they go missing. As Rose says of her own mother, who lived hard and had nothing "My mother, outside somewhere dark, alone, missed by no one." Shirley calls them the 'harem' and Rose's youth and naivety blinds her to the threat the girls pose to her relationship. But with the all knowing, all seeing intelligent presence of Shirley, Rose will come to know the devil in all things.
Shirley soon becomes Rose's center, but is Rose as vital to Shirley? Shirley's mind isn't one that can be entered lightly nor is hers an easily deciphered soul. Shirley resents Rose's attempts to make a character of her, though everyone in Shirley's life seems to Rose to be nothing but characters she can position at will. From the start she sees Shirley as a kindred, "Shirley's was the smile of a woman like me, the abandoned and the never-loved, it was the smile of the arrogantly insecure." ...the smile of the brilliant person in a woman's body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell.I loved her immediately, I wanted to be her and take care of her." The line about being brilliant in a woman's body and beautiful in an ugly shell is perfection in this novel. Because we see what the struggle to rise above those restrictions does to a woman, how maddening it is that when one reaches success there too follows labels and envy. God help a brilliant, ugly woman in a man's world. This story takes place in the 60's but could just as well hold true for the struggles women face today.
The novel is so beautifully written, and dark only because the ugly side of things seems to infect us, bringing out the devil in us all. It is more than an excavation of marriage and art, it is an awakening. Rose will be fresh and new, like a blossom and the harsh environment of the house, of life itself, will slowly wither her. Wisdom has a high price.
I recommend this brilliant novel to everyone. I love it so very much. This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It isn't often that I am sad when a novel ends, and a story is always best when the characters grow, for better or for worse.
June 22, 2014
A fictionalized account of a couple cohabiting with real-life horror writer Shirley Jackson, and her husband Stanley Hyman, this was disappointing to me. Jackson makes horror out of the mundane, while Merrell tries the reader's patience with anticlimactic denouement and distracting literary quotes. I finished it; I love the idea of it, but meh.
October 28, 2018
This book was totally mesmerizing from start to finish. How many of us booklovers cannot attest to becoming obsessed by our favorite authors? This book is an homage to obsession!
We meet Rose and her husband Fred who move in with Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman. Rose is in awe of Shirley. She sees in her the mother she wished she had and she sees her as a friend. She is drawn to her magnetism, her larger than life personality.
There is an underlying tension in the book; an ominous feeling that kept me riveted. I haven't read a book by Shirley Jackson since I was a teenager, but I feel that the author was working to capture her writing. The writing and the tone of the book was spot on!
I loved the references to Ms. Jackson's books as well as the references to other writers and poets.
The spirit of Shirley Jackson lives on in this book. The author has brought her back to life and I so enjoyed getting to know her- weirdness and all!
Lines I loved:
"I thought about explaining that a woman like Shirley didn't have to get along, that it wasn't necessary to belong if you were special."
" But I know I'm right: that was Jackson's gift, to understand the absurd unloveliness of love."
Good news for movie lovers- this book is soon to be released as a movie.
We meet Rose and her husband Fred who move in with Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman. Rose is in awe of Shirley. She sees in her the mother she wished she had and she sees her as a friend. She is drawn to her magnetism, her larger than life personality.
There is an underlying tension in the book; an ominous feeling that kept me riveted. I haven't read a book by Shirley Jackson since I was a teenager, but I feel that the author was working to capture her writing. The writing and the tone of the book was spot on!
I loved the references to Ms. Jackson's books as well as the references to other writers and poets.
The spirit of Shirley Jackson lives on in this book. The author has brought her back to life and I so enjoyed getting to know her- weirdness and all!
Lines I loved:
"I thought about explaining that a woman like Shirley didn't have to get along, that it wasn't necessary to belong if you were special."
" But I know I'm right: that was Jackson's gift, to understand the absurd unloveliness of love."
Good news for movie lovers- this book is soon to be released as a movie.
June 13, 2014
Susan Scarf Merrell’s "Shirley: A Novel" is a psychological thriller about a young woman who lives for a year in the home of celebrated writer Shirley Jackson in the 1960s. Merrell mingles the real and the fictional in an interesting fashion, and provides a compelling character study of Jackson. The novel, however, did not captivate me as much as I had hoped.
The Story: A young woman named Rose Nemser, newly married and soon to become a mother, comes to live in the home of Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman at Bennington College in Vermont in the mid-1960s. Rose’s husband Fred is a graduate student in English, and Hyman, a noted literary critic, takes him under his wing. Jackson, of course, is the real-life author of the famous short story “The Lottery,” as well as other fiction. While the literary world considers Hyman as the more intellectual of the two, it is Jackson’s writing that pays the family’s bills.
Rose falls under the spell of the fascinating but unpredictable Shirley, hoping to emulate her as a writer and as a person. However, she begins to suspect something is amiss in the Hyman-Jackson home—there are troubling, unanswered phone calls, and gossip in the village about Stanley’s affairs. Rose becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a Bennington student years earlier.
What I Thought: This is a fairly unusual novel. Merrell does some interesting things here by blending real historical characters and events into her fiction. The disappearance of the student, for example, actually occurred in 1946 and is still unsolved. The novel provides a fairly intriguing character study of Shirley Jackson, and Merrell even tells the story in the way that, perhaps, Jackson herself would have. I would imagine this is a must-read for serious Jackson fans.
But although I appreciated the author’s intent here, I don’t think this novel is fully successful. While Merrell capably builds up tension and evokes a creepy sense of dread, there is little pay-off in the conclusion. The suspense, for me, didn't lead anywhere, and key questions are left unanswered. Merrell alludes to some tantalizing elements about Rose’s past, but does not follow through enough on these threads. Rose, in fact, seemed little more than a cipher to me, and I struggled to find an emotional connection to her. In the end, I found this to be an interesting read, but not wholly satisfying. I would rate "Shirley" about 2.5 out of 5 stars.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
You can find this and other other book reviews on my blog, Readers' Oasis, at http://leilarice.blogspot.com.
The Story: A young woman named Rose Nemser, newly married and soon to become a mother, comes to live in the home of Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman at Bennington College in Vermont in the mid-1960s. Rose’s husband Fred is a graduate student in English, and Hyman, a noted literary critic, takes him under his wing. Jackson, of course, is the real-life author of the famous short story “The Lottery,” as well as other fiction. While the literary world considers Hyman as the more intellectual of the two, it is Jackson’s writing that pays the family’s bills.
Rose falls under the spell of the fascinating but unpredictable Shirley, hoping to emulate her as a writer and as a person. However, she begins to suspect something is amiss in the Hyman-Jackson home—there are troubling, unanswered phone calls, and gossip in the village about Stanley’s affairs. Rose becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a Bennington student years earlier.
What I Thought: This is a fairly unusual novel. Merrell does some interesting things here by blending real historical characters and events into her fiction. The disappearance of the student, for example, actually occurred in 1946 and is still unsolved. The novel provides a fairly intriguing character study of Shirley Jackson, and Merrell even tells the story in the way that, perhaps, Jackson herself would have. I would imagine this is a must-read for serious Jackson fans.
But although I appreciated the author’s intent here, I don’t think this novel is fully successful. While Merrell capably builds up tension and evokes a creepy sense of dread, there is little pay-off in the conclusion. The suspense, for me, didn't lead anywhere, and key questions are left unanswered. Merrell alludes to some tantalizing elements about Rose’s past, but does not follow through enough on these threads. Rose, in fact, seemed little more than a cipher to me, and I struggled to find an emotional connection to her. In the end, I found this to be an interesting read, but not wholly satisfying. I would rate "Shirley" about 2.5 out of 5 stars.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
You can find this and other other book reviews on my blog, Readers' Oasis, at http://leilarice.blogspot.com.
February 14, 2014
Shirley Jackson is my favorite writer, so the idea of a novel in which she is a character both entices and, well, alarms. Susan Merrell has, I think, succeeded amazingly well in getting onto the page a person you can believe is Shirley Jackson. Beyond even that, Merrell has imagined an anxiety-inducing, irresistible story—of a young couple that come to live with Jackson and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, in Bennington—that is not only a fine homage to Jackson but almost feels like a story she might have chosen to tell.
At a certain point, a little short of halfway through the novel, I was so entranced that I knew I was not going to stop reading until I'd gotten to the very end. And I barely moved a muscle for hours except to turn pages.
At a certain point, a little short of halfway through the novel, I was so entranced that I knew I was not going to stop reading until I'd gotten to the very end. And I barely moved a muscle for hours except to turn pages.
February 16, 2014
ARC for review.
This is described as a psychological thriller, but don't expect twists, turns and suspense. It's really more of a character study of the Shirley Jackson of the author's imagination. Rose is a very young wife and expectant mother from a difficult background. She and her grad student (or professor? Aspiring professor?) husband go to Bennington College so he can work and finish his dissertation and they live with his mentor Stanley Hyman and his wife Shirley Jackson. Jackson has already published widely at this point, including The Haunting of Hill House and Rose admires and comes to love Jackson as her own mentor and mother figure. However, the Hyman/Jackson marriage is an incredibly difficult one, filled with secrets and Rose's life begins to mirror that aspect as well.
So, the good - I absolutely adored this idea. Shirley Jackson is one of my all-time favorites (side note - I have an incredibly vivid memory of reading "The Lottery" for the first time. I was in ninth grade, first week of school. Like so many book lovers I would get my English textbook and immediately read nearly everything in it. Sandwiched between "Romeo and Juliet" and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, there it was. So dark and so very perfect! I was sitting in Earth Science reading away (which is why med school was never in the cards) and I was absolutely gutted.) The idea of a peek at her life (even fictionalized) was exciting. The book was well-written and very engaging. I loved the relationships between the characters, even the minor ones between Rose and Shirley's children. I enjoyed the mysterious aspects, touched upon but never incredibly explicit, and including an interesting tie to one of Jackson's short stories.
Oh, and Rose's constant exhaustion - this was done so well. First Rose is pregnant, so her repeated episodes of incredible drowsiness make sense and then she's a new mother, sleeping when the baby sleeps, so it all makes sense, but it's also as if the house and/or the force of Jackson adds to her issue - she seems always to be drifting off to sleep or waking and Merrell does a great job of extending this dreamy, drowsy feel to the entire Bennington stay. In fact,
The not-as-good - the heavy-handed THoHH imagery. The idea that the Jackson/Hyman house was alive and speaking to Rose/Eleanor was mentioned about a hundred times - total overkill, and, after awhile, distracting. Imagine "House of Cards" where Claire Underwood walks through her house with blood on her hands, not once but twenty times (yes, my husband and I watched all thirteen episodes this weekend, what of it? =)) - anyway, some things cry out for subtlety.
Overall, a successive novelization of a popular writer's life and well-worth reading for fans of Jackson.
This is described as a psychological thriller, but don't expect twists, turns and suspense. It's really more of a character study of the Shirley Jackson of the author's imagination. Rose is a very young wife and expectant mother from a difficult background. She and her grad student (or professor? Aspiring professor?) husband go to Bennington College so he can work and finish his dissertation and they live with his mentor Stanley Hyman and his wife Shirley Jackson. Jackson has already published widely at this point, including The Haunting of Hill House and Rose admires and comes to love Jackson as her own mentor and mother figure. However, the Hyman/Jackson marriage is an incredibly difficult one, filled with secrets and Rose's life begins to mirror that aspect as well.
So, the good - I absolutely adored this idea. Shirley Jackson is one of my all-time favorites (side note - I have an incredibly vivid memory of reading "The Lottery" for the first time. I was in ninth grade, first week of school. Like so many book lovers I would get my English textbook and immediately read nearly everything in it. Sandwiched between "Romeo and Juliet" and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, there it was. So dark and so very perfect! I was sitting in Earth Science reading away (which is why med school was never in the cards) and I was absolutely gutted.) The idea of a peek at her life (even fictionalized) was exciting. The book was well-written and very engaging. I loved the relationships between the characters, even the minor ones between Rose and Shirley's children. I enjoyed the mysterious aspects, touched upon but never incredibly explicit, and including an interesting tie to one of Jackson's short stories.
Oh, and Rose's constant exhaustion - this was done so well. First Rose is pregnant, so her repeated episodes of incredible drowsiness make sense and then she's a new mother, sleeping when the baby sleeps, so it all makes sense, but it's also as if the house and/or the force of Jackson adds to her issue - she seems always to be drifting off to sleep or waking and Merrell does a great job of extending this dreamy, drowsy feel to the entire Bennington stay. In fact,
The not-as-good - the heavy-handed THoHH imagery. The idea that the Jackson/Hyman house was alive and speaking to Rose/Eleanor was mentioned about a hundred times - total overkill, and, after awhile, distracting. Imagine "House of Cards" where Claire Underwood walks through her house with blood on her hands, not once but twenty times (yes, my husband and I watched all thirteen episodes this weekend, what of it? =)) - anyway, some things cry out for subtlety.
Overall, a successive novelization of a popular writer's life and well-worth reading for fans of Jackson.
February 1, 2025
I think, in hindsight, that the chances of me liking this book even in the hands of a much better writer were slim to none. There’s something so odd about writing a novel crammed full to the brim with details about an actual real-life person, giving said real person the most insane manic-pixie-dream-girl treatment imaginable, and then ending the book by heavily implying that they were somehow involved in the (real life!) disappearance of a young woman in the 1940s.
So already, shaky ground on which to situate the novel. But the additional problem here is that Susan Scarf Merrell just never managed to pull her goals for this book together in a way that made it pleasant to read. At times it’s painfully obvious that Merrell wants to write a story that Jackson herself would write, but the novel is so much more in-your-face and hollow than anything Jackson has ever written. Merrell keeps the neurotic narrator, the questionably sentient house, and the focus on motifs like fire or the dark underbelly of domesticity, and then tosses out everything else, including Jackson’s hallmark prose and subtlety.
Merrell also REALLY wanted the reader to know that she knows her subject. Every other paragraph is a tangential piece of biographical information from Jackson’s life—her writing preferences, her relationships to her contemporaries, even the kinds of food that she cooked for her husband’s specific health conditions. But these details aren’t woven into the narrative in a way that makes Shirley feel real, or that realistically situate the novel within her life. Instead, the effect is that the reader is left with a somewhat mediocre and meandering psychological thriller that occasionally steps out of itself to give a list of fun facts about Shirley Jackson.
As a piece of biographical fiction about Shirley Jackson, it’s a hard no from me. It works a little bit better as a domestic psychological thriller, but in the end Merrell just relies too much on the specific vibe that slapping Shirley Jackson’s face on the cover will bring to the novel. There’s all of this build up and allusion to events in the narrator’s past that never really build to anything. The entire book is a set up to a story that never actually gets told.
I’m almost, like, insulted on Jackson’s behalf. Oof.
So already, shaky ground on which to situate the novel. But the additional problem here is that Susan Scarf Merrell just never managed to pull her goals for this book together in a way that made it pleasant to read. At times it’s painfully obvious that Merrell wants to write a story that Jackson herself would write, but the novel is so much more in-your-face and hollow than anything Jackson has ever written. Merrell keeps the neurotic narrator, the questionably sentient house, and the focus on motifs like fire or the dark underbelly of domesticity, and then tosses out everything else, including Jackson’s hallmark prose and subtlety.
Merrell also REALLY wanted the reader to know that she knows her subject. Every other paragraph is a tangential piece of biographical information from Jackson’s life—her writing preferences, her relationships to her contemporaries, even the kinds of food that she cooked for her husband’s specific health conditions. But these details aren’t woven into the narrative in a way that makes Shirley feel real, or that realistically situate the novel within her life. Instead, the effect is that the reader is left with a somewhat mediocre and meandering psychological thriller that occasionally steps out of itself to give a list of fun facts about Shirley Jackson.
As a piece of biographical fiction about Shirley Jackson, it’s a hard no from me. It works a little bit better as a domestic psychological thriller, but in the end Merrell just relies too much on the specific vibe that slapping Shirley Jackson’s face on the cover will bring to the novel. There’s all of this build up and allusion to events in the narrator’s past that never really build to anything. The entire book is a set up to a story that never actually gets told.
I’m almost, like, insulted on Jackson’s behalf. Oof.
June 27, 2014
As a Bennington College grad myself, whose mother studied with Stanley Hyman at Bennington, I have long been fascinated with Shirley Jackson. I remember being a little girl and visiting the college, my mother saying, “She lived in that house,” while pointing at the great white, columned façade on Prospect Street, a steep-sloping lane that leads to the back entrance of the campus. Many years later, I lived in what was known as the Pink House, just a few houses down from Shirley Jackson’s house, my bedroom overlooking the very square where the stoning was imagined to have taken place in “The Lottery.” The old Hyman house (which everyone called the Jackson House), was a mysterious place: one hardly ever saw the inhabitants, or the lights on, and the building itself looked the same as it did when I’d first seen it in the 1970s, and my mother first knew it, in the late 1950s. It was a house that was easy to be obsessed with.
Susan Scarf Merrell does the house justice in her unsettling novel, “Shirley,” in which Shirley and Stanley Hyman take center stage. The narrator, a fictional young wife of Stanley Hyman’s teaching assistant, named Rose Nemser, is quickly swept up in the house’s strange combination of unnerving melancholy and warm family vibe. It’s an overt nod to “The Haunting of Hill House,” of course, with Rose at several points worrying she is becoming “Eleanor” and that the house will “reject” her. But it’s Shirley’s rejection she really fears, a rejection that turns self-fulfilling prophecy when Rose becomes enmeshed in the Hyman’s dysfunctional marriage.
Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman were Mad Men-era intellectual liberals working under the guise of a progressive college, but living in a tiny, conservative village whose inhabitants were both fascinated and repelled by them. Merrell captures the atmosphere of this strange dynamic perfectly. Even more harrowing than Rose’s obsession with a missing (probably murdered) Bennington College girl, are her trips to the North B. library to talk to the subtly frightful librarian, and the night she has to host Bernard Malamud for dinner, the Malamuds dredging up jealousy, rage and screeching depression just by stepping inside the creaky front door of that creepy white-columned home.
At the core of this novel is Rose, who may at times remind the reader of Rose Baker in Suzanne Rindell’s “The Other Typist”: unreliable, unstable, and self-preoccupied. I must admit I found it disconcerting to read yet another portrayal of a female narcissist (they seem to be in abundance these days), until I realized that all the insecurities and paranoia, the projection and abandonment fear, the fabricating and obsessing that are wrapped up in this one character are just, well, everything that lurks inside any Shirley Jackson story. The House is the story, the women in the House is the story. Shirley Jackson is the story, coming to life and still haunting the reader from the other side.
Susan Scarf Merrell does the house justice in her unsettling novel, “Shirley,” in which Shirley and Stanley Hyman take center stage. The narrator, a fictional young wife of Stanley Hyman’s teaching assistant, named Rose Nemser, is quickly swept up in the house’s strange combination of unnerving melancholy and warm family vibe. It’s an overt nod to “The Haunting of Hill House,” of course, with Rose at several points worrying she is becoming “Eleanor” and that the house will “reject” her. But it’s Shirley’s rejection she really fears, a rejection that turns self-fulfilling prophecy when Rose becomes enmeshed in the Hyman’s dysfunctional marriage.
Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman were Mad Men-era intellectual liberals working under the guise of a progressive college, but living in a tiny, conservative village whose inhabitants were both fascinated and repelled by them. Merrell captures the atmosphere of this strange dynamic perfectly. Even more harrowing than Rose’s obsession with a missing (probably murdered) Bennington College girl, are her trips to the North B. library to talk to the subtly frightful librarian, and the night she has to host Bernard Malamud for dinner, the Malamuds dredging up jealousy, rage and screeching depression just by stepping inside the creaky front door of that creepy white-columned home.
At the core of this novel is Rose, who may at times remind the reader of Rose Baker in Suzanne Rindell’s “The Other Typist”: unreliable, unstable, and self-preoccupied. I must admit I found it disconcerting to read yet another portrayal of a female narcissist (they seem to be in abundance these days), until I realized that all the insecurities and paranoia, the projection and abandonment fear, the fabricating and obsessing that are wrapped up in this one character are just, well, everything that lurks inside any Shirley Jackson story. The House is the story, the women in the House is the story. Shirley Jackson is the story, coming to life and still haunting the reader from the other side.
July 23, 2014
At least ten years ago I read Merrell's "A Member of the Family" and found it memorable and haunting. I knew that there were negative reviews: Merrell dealt with a contentious issue but I was convinced that the novel was fiction and I remembered and admired its explication of deeply wounding human dilemmas. But what a falling off there has been!
As a long-time fan of Shirley Jackson, and a one-time fan of Merrell, I naturally wanted to read "Shirley". How devastated I am to report that I think the "novel" is a disturbing gimmick that should not be legal. Depicting Shirley Jackson, her literary critic husband, and their children as fully fleshed "characters" seems simply a heinous way to grab onto Jackson's enduring fame.
I felt contaminated by association as I continued to read. How can Merrell know any of this? Can it really be legal to "fictionalize" somebody who has many living relatives and friends left who know more sides to the truth? Is such a work fair? Are Bernard Malamud and his wife accurately depicted?
While I will avoid spoilers, I thought that if Merrell wanted to write a book about a character like her Rose --a new mother and a quasi-faculty wife in the mid 1960's -- she could have done it without using Jackson and her family as an enormous calling card. This book will sell many copies because of the Jackson nexus but it's important to recall that this nexus is invented largely by Merrell based on possible rumours, possible gossip, and does not serve as anything but a rather sleazy and possibly illegal way to sell copies.
Finally reviews I have read on Amazon and Good Reads indicate that many readers are taking this as legitimate biographical material.
Caveat lector. I think it's unethical to put words in the mouths of people when you cannot provide a citation and a source. Evidently there is a biography coming out in a year or two. Take a look at it; see if it is authorized by the Jackson estate.
Merrell's ethical scope is about at the level of the paparazzi as far as I can ascertain. And finally had Merrell wanted to write about Jackson, she could have written something like Mead's "My Life in Middlemarch" which is about a reader's experience with a novel. Mead does not put words in Eliot's mouth. "Badly done, Merrell!"
As a long-time fan of Shirley Jackson, and a one-time fan of Merrell, I naturally wanted to read "Shirley". How devastated I am to report that I think the "novel" is a disturbing gimmick that should not be legal. Depicting Shirley Jackson, her literary critic husband, and their children as fully fleshed "characters" seems simply a heinous way to grab onto Jackson's enduring fame.
I felt contaminated by association as I continued to read. How can Merrell know any of this? Can it really be legal to "fictionalize" somebody who has many living relatives and friends left who know more sides to the truth? Is such a work fair? Are Bernard Malamud and his wife accurately depicted?
While I will avoid spoilers, I thought that if Merrell wanted to write a book about a character like her Rose --a new mother and a quasi-faculty wife in the mid 1960's -- she could have done it without using Jackson and her family as an enormous calling card. This book will sell many copies because of the Jackson nexus but it's important to recall that this nexus is invented largely by Merrell based on possible rumours, possible gossip, and does not serve as anything but a rather sleazy and possibly illegal way to sell copies.
Finally reviews I have read on Amazon and Good Reads indicate that many readers are taking this as legitimate biographical material.
Caveat lector. I think it's unethical to put words in the mouths of people when you cannot provide a citation and a source. Evidently there is a biography coming out in a year or two. Take a look at it; see if it is authorized by the Jackson estate.
Merrell's ethical scope is about at the level of the paparazzi as far as I can ascertain. And finally had Merrell wanted to write about Jackson, she could have written something like Mead's "My Life in Middlemarch" which is about a reader's experience with a novel. Mead does not put words in Eliot's mouth. "Badly done, Merrell!"
July 9, 2014
Merrell's penchant for telling rather than showing, her eye for visual and musical details, makes Shirley more of a movie scenario than a novel. The narrator Rose, a newly pregnant and married nineteen-year-old comes to the home of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman near Bennington College so her husband Fred can help Hyman teach a course on folklore while Rose helps Hyman's wife, the psychologically fragile author Shirley Jackson, keep the household from falling into chaos. Rose becomes smitten with Jackson in a fairly icky way, and Fred takes on Hyman's worst habits. The idea here was better than the mawkish execution.
June 19, 2014
Mesmerizing, odd, and yes, Jackson-esque novel featuring Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman as hosts to a graduate student and his young, pregnant wife Rose. Rose becomes obsessed with Shirley and with the disappearance of student, and so do we the readers. Very well done!
August 4, 2014
This book was more literary in nature than I expected it to be and I found myself getting dragged into the story easily in the beginning. The story, however, got more confusing and vague with each passing chapter. There were many questions left unanswered and situations left up to the readers interpretation. A young couple, Rose and Fred, spend a year living with writer Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley Hyman. Fred gets an opportunity to work under Stanley at the college nearby. Rose and Fred are fictional, but Shirley and Stanley actually existed and this book is loosely based on their lives. This living situation with Shirley and Stanley seem to slowly possess the young couple. The longer they live there the more dreamlike the writing became. Like I stated before, much of the story had a vagueness to it. Was Shirley a witch who cast spells? Did Rose become a witch also or did the house just speak to her through her dreams and in doors that creak and stick? Did the house speak to Shirley too? And what about Paula, the young college student, did Shirley and Stanley have anything to do with her disappearance long ago? I think there was promise to this book, but all the questions left standing made it fall somewhat flat for me. Whether the reader gets answers to these questions or not, one thing rings true… the living situation was toxic for Rose and Fred’s new marriage. This book was also a study of Shirley and Stanley’s dysfunctional relationship which included lots of infidelity. I am not familiar with Shirley Jackson’s novels or her husband’s work. I am also not very familiar with many of the great writers that they speak of over their dinner table and maybe those who are may enjoy this novel more than I did. This is cast as a psychological thriller and while it is that, it’s suspenseful moments come slowly and quietly.
(A copy was provided to me by Blue Rider Press via NetGalley.)
I thought I would include a picture of Shirley Jackson and one of Stanley Edgar Hyman just to put a face to the names in this book.
(A copy was provided to me by Blue Rider Press via NetGalley.)
I thought I would include a picture of Shirley Jackson and one of Stanley Edgar Hyman just to put a face to the names in this book.
September 14, 2015
If nothing else, you have to admire Susan Scarf Merrell's guts.
It takes a little something to base a novel on a year in the life of a writer whose work most people aren't familiar with; more to do it in such a way as to be an intertextual homage to that author. That's not just gutsy, it's horribly niche in terms of marketing. And yet.
Shirley Jackson, whose short story "The Lottery" may be a staple of high school anthologies but whose novels (excepting the magnificent The Haunting of Hill House) were largely out of print until just the last few years, certainly deserves the attention SSM lavishes on her here. Jackson had a complicated life full of complicated relationships, and Merrell channels all of that into a riveting portrayal of the author which makes her quite literally monumental by equating her thematically with her house. If that sounds a bit Hill House, that's because it is - Shirley is thick with allusions to Jackson's work, and James Harris, the demon lover who crops up so often in Jackson's tales, makes an appearance here as well, though perhaps not how you'd expect.
If I haven't bothered mentioning the nominal narrator, Rose, that's because Rose (like Eleanor in tHoHH) is just there to get us in the door, so to speak, and really only sees herself in relation to the larger-than-life Shirley. In other words: don't expect to like her too much, and don't expect gobs of plot.
I enjoyed Shirley, but I'm not sure I can count it as being a truly successful novel. It's the kind of book that, to work, demands that you be already be familiar (and fond) of its subject matter. What's wrong with a book having standards, you ask? Nothing, necessarily. It's just that I don't set much value on winning over people who already agree with you, and I suspect Shirley, by its very nature, lacks the accessibility to create new converts to Jackson's work.
It takes a little something to base a novel on a year in the life of a writer whose work most people aren't familiar with; more to do it in such a way as to be an intertextual homage to that author. That's not just gutsy, it's horribly niche in terms of marketing. And yet.
Shirley Jackson, whose short story "The Lottery" may be a staple of high school anthologies but whose novels (excepting the magnificent The Haunting of Hill House) were largely out of print until just the last few years, certainly deserves the attention SSM lavishes on her here. Jackson had a complicated life full of complicated relationships, and Merrell channels all of that into a riveting portrayal of the author which makes her quite literally monumental by equating her thematically with her house. If that sounds a bit Hill House, that's because it is - Shirley is thick with allusions to Jackson's work, and James Harris, the demon lover who crops up so often in Jackson's tales, makes an appearance here as well, though perhaps not how you'd expect.
If I haven't bothered mentioning the nominal narrator, Rose, that's because Rose (like Eleanor in tHoHH) is just there to get us in the door, so to speak, and really only sees herself in relation to the larger-than-life Shirley. In other words: don't expect to like her too much, and don't expect gobs of plot.
I enjoyed Shirley, but I'm not sure I can count it as being a truly successful novel. It's the kind of book that, to work, demands that you be already be familiar (and fond) of its subject matter. What's wrong with a book having standards, you ask? Nothing, necessarily. It's just that I don't set much value on winning over people who already agree with you, and I suspect Shirley, by its very nature, lacks the accessibility to create new converts to Jackson's work.
December 17, 2016
I could not have found a better book to wrap up my 'year of reading Shirley,' especially immediately after reading her new biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Now I feel like I "really know" her, and what it was like to live with her. A fictionalized account of a young academic and his wife living with Shirley and her husband (Stanley Hyman) for a year in Bennington VT, this is nearly as well-researched as her bio. Many events that really happened are recounted or alluded to here, such as the rowdy house party attended by Dylan Thomas that spilled out into the snow-covered yard. This has been described as a psychological thriller, and there is a thread of mystery spun around the circumstances of a young girl whose disappearance had inspired Ms Jackson's story, "The Missing Girl," but I'm not sure thriller is the right word to use here. I'm also not sure how appealing this book would be to someone who isn't a huge Shirley Jackson fangirl, but I found it immensely satisfying. The audiobook version was great - the way the reader did Shirley's voice sounded exactly like I imagined it, husky from bourbon and cigarettes.
June 8, 2014
I received this book for free through the Goodreads First Reads program and it may well be my favorite of all the books I have won to date. It is the fictionalized story of young newlyweds Rose and Fred Nemser who come to live for a time with actual literary couple Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman. The story contains persistent undertones of dysfunction, betrayal, mental illness and death and there is a wonderful gothic heaviness to the writing. I found myself mesmerized by this book and its intriguing, if not altogether likable characters. I am left wanting to read more about and by Shirley Jackson and also about the disappearance of college co-ed Paula Weldon, a case which figures prominently in this book as well as in some of Shirley Jackson's own writings. I am so glad I had to opportunity to read this book.
August 30, 2016
Reading this
novel is akin to the changing perspectives an optometrist delivers with his or her lenses during a vision exam: first, we see Shirley Jackson, fine writer, from afar; change a lens- we see her in person-homemaker, wife, mother; another lens, through her husband's eyes, her children's perspective; then another lens and she is viewed as potential mentor, mother-figure,surrogate older sister. Change the lens again; yet more perspectives reveal themselves.
novel is akin to the changing perspectives an optometrist delivers with his or her lenses during a vision exam: first, we see Shirley Jackson, fine writer, from afar; change a lens- we see her in person-homemaker, wife, mother; another lens, through her husband's eyes, her children's perspective; then another lens and she is viewed as potential mentor, mother-figure,surrogate older sister. Change the lens again; yet more perspectives reveal themselves.
August 6, 2014
Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of novelist Shirley Jackson, and since she died at 48 (in her sleep, of heart failure), December 2016 will be the centenary of her birth. Best remembered for her short story "The Lottery" and her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson has acquired some new readers in the past year thanks to Penguin reprints of the four novels she published between 1948 and 1958, including the only one set in her native San Francisco Bay area: The Road Through the Wall.
For much of her writing career, Shirley and her family of four children lived in Bennington, Vermont, where her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught at Bennington College--a women's school in those days. This novel, set in the last year of Shirley's life, centers on a (fictional) young couple from Philadelphia, Rose and Fred Nemser, who come to live with the Hymans. Fred, a Ph.D. candidate at Temple, has landed a job assisting Stanley with his folklore classes, and Rose, his pregnant 19-year-old wife, a former student he married after a whirlwind courtship, is thrilled and a little scared to be meeting the famous Shirley Jackson. The initial plan is for Fred and Rose to rent an apartment, but Shirley finds Rose intriguing and a possible stimulus to her writing, so they wind up living in the spare room, with Rose helping out with shopping and meal preparation.
Rose's apprehension turns out to be amply justified, because Shirley Jackson Hyman is a complicated person. Her moods vary widely; she can be a sympathetic listener and a charming hostess to the literary celebrities who come to visit, but she can also be abrupt and hypercritical at times. She seems to have a remarkable ability to read Rose's thoughts and to sense details about her troubled childhood. At one point she tells Rose that the two of them must stick together as "girls without mothers", though both are emotional rather than literal orphans. Part of Shirley's volatility stems from progress or lack thereof on her current writing project, but the dynamics of her relationship with Stanley are also involved. They are clearly deeply in love, and Shirley considers him the best judge of her writing, but his constant infidelities with both students and "townies" lead to noisy arguments and drinking binges. As a contemporary of the Bennington students, Rose finds it hard to imagine pudgy, rumpled Stanley as a lover--at least at first.
Rose is as complicated as Shirley, in her own way. Her chaotic, often impoverished upbringing has left her in need of parental authority figures. She coldly rejects the Hyman children's friendly overtures, envying their relationship with Shirley and Stanley, and she becomes fixated on Paula Welden, a Bennington student who mysteriously vanished while hiking back in 1946. Though Shirley used the incident in her writing, both she and Stanley deny knowing Paula, but Rose senses that they are lying and may have been involved somehow in her disappearance. She also feels the Hymans' Victorian house as a living presence, sympathizing with her or disapproving of her presence. In the course of her months in Bennington, Rose gives birth to her daughter and experiences a tumultuous series of events that will affect the rest of her life. Not surprisingly, her relationship with Shirley does not end well, but in looking back ten years later, Rose comes to realize the impact she had on what proved to be the last of Shirley's literary output.
Shirley the novel has a few minor weak spots: We learn just enough about Rose's parents and her long-suffering older sister to want to know more, and this lack of detail sometimes makes it hard to see why Rose reacts or behaves as she does. But Shirley and Stanley are fascinating and believable human beings, and there are a number of beautifully written, sometimes amusing, set pieces, including a very entertaining cameo appearance by Bernard Malamud and his wife. Anyone who reads this book will want to explore the fictional creations of Shirley Jackson--particularly her last, unfinished novel, published posthumously as Come Along With Me.
Reviewed by Robert Anderson, Librarian III, Literature & Fiction Department.
For much of her writing career, Shirley and her family of four children lived in Bennington, Vermont, where her husband, critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught at Bennington College--a women's school in those days. This novel, set in the last year of Shirley's life, centers on a (fictional) young couple from Philadelphia, Rose and Fred Nemser, who come to live with the Hymans. Fred, a Ph.D. candidate at Temple, has landed a job assisting Stanley with his folklore classes, and Rose, his pregnant 19-year-old wife, a former student he married after a whirlwind courtship, is thrilled and a little scared to be meeting the famous Shirley Jackson. The initial plan is for Fred and Rose to rent an apartment, but Shirley finds Rose intriguing and a possible stimulus to her writing, so they wind up living in the spare room, with Rose helping out with shopping and meal preparation.
Rose's apprehension turns out to be amply justified, because Shirley Jackson Hyman is a complicated person. Her moods vary widely; she can be a sympathetic listener and a charming hostess to the literary celebrities who come to visit, but she can also be abrupt and hypercritical at times. She seems to have a remarkable ability to read Rose's thoughts and to sense details about her troubled childhood. At one point she tells Rose that the two of them must stick together as "girls without mothers", though both are emotional rather than literal orphans. Part of Shirley's volatility stems from progress or lack thereof on her current writing project, but the dynamics of her relationship with Stanley are also involved. They are clearly deeply in love, and Shirley considers him the best judge of her writing, but his constant infidelities with both students and "townies" lead to noisy arguments and drinking binges. As a contemporary of the Bennington students, Rose finds it hard to imagine pudgy, rumpled Stanley as a lover--at least at first.
Rose is as complicated as Shirley, in her own way. Her chaotic, often impoverished upbringing has left her in need of parental authority figures. She coldly rejects the Hyman children's friendly overtures, envying their relationship with Shirley and Stanley, and she becomes fixated on Paula Welden, a Bennington student who mysteriously vanished while hiking back in 1946. Though Shirley used the incident in her writing, both she and Stanley deny knowing Paula, but Rose senses that they are lying and may have been involved somehow in her disappearance. She also feels the Hymans' Victorian house as a living presence, sympathizing with her or disapproving of her presence. In the course of her months in Bennington, Rose gives birth to her daughter and experiences a tumultuous series of events that will affect the rest of her life. Not surprisingly, her relationship with Shirley does not end well, but in looking back ten years later, Rose comes to realize the impact she had on what proved to be the last of Shirley's literary output.
Shirley the novel has a few minor weak spots: We learn just enough about Rose's parents and her long-suffering older sister to want to know more, and this lack of detail sometimes makes it hard to see why Rose reacts or behaves as she does. But Shirley and Stanley are fascinating and believable human beings, and there are a number of beautifully written, sometimes amusing, set pieces, including a very entertaining cameo appearance by Bernard Malamud and his wife. Anyone who reads this book will want to explore the fictional creations of Shirley Jackson--particularly her last, unfinished novel, published posthumously as Come Along With Me.
Reviewed by Robert Anderson, Librarian III, Literature & Fiction Department.
September 1, 2014
I first read Shirley Jackson when I was in middle school. The novel "We Have Always Lived in the Castle' to be exact. I was too inexperienced to know good writing from bad but I knew it provoked some seriously intense emotions within me. Dark emotions, feelings of claustrophobia, feelings of despair and hopelessness. It really bothered me and I was hooked. Better to feel something/anything than to be bored or nonplussed. I next borrowed 'The Haunting of Hill House' from the library. I loved it. It creeped me out. I felt that this was a believable and sophisticated ghost story much more impressive than any I had read to date. A few years later, I got my hands on copies of both 'Life Among the Savages' and 'Raising Demons'; her autobiographical novels of her life with her husband and children. Once again, I was utterly captivated, charmed and amused. Needless to say, I am a life long fan and own a copy of all of her work and have read many of them over and over. So, I was on high alert to be disappointed and critical of an author who dared write a story with Shirley and her husband, Stanley, as characters. This can work quite well (example: Robert Goldsborough continuing the Nero Wolfe series after Rex Stout's death) or quite badly (example: Danielle Page writing 'No Place Like Oz/Dorothy Must Die' as a continuation of the Oz series....she completely disregards the original Dorothy's character and personality and makes her into a modern day whining brat;; I am deeply offended and turned off owning 40 of the Baum Oz/Ruth Plumly Thompson, et. al, original books, so I am more than acquainted with little Dorothy who was a sweet child.) All of that being said, Susan Scarf Merrell has done a brilliant job in writing this...she brings Shirley and Stanley to life again, quite believably. She even evokes some of the haunting quality reminiscent of Shirley Jackson stories. I will even say there were some profound moments if you have lived a certain type of life that echoed all too true to me. One could read this without having heard of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman, knowing nothing about them. However, it just adds innummerable layers if one is familiar with Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman and know about the life they led. The story does not feel like a stretch, it feels like a 'true' story and sends a shiver down the spine.
November 2, 2016
This is a fictionalized account of a fragment of the life of SHirley Jackson, who wrote some wonderful short stories including the very famous The Lottery and one of my favorites, the lesser known An Ordinary Day with Peanuts. As fiction, the book tells a believable tale of life in a chaotic intellectual household with drinking, infidelity, and uproarious evenings, with a young couple who live with the established older couple when they first move to Bennington Vermont. The narrator, the young, high school graduate wife of the couple becomes mildly obsessed with Jakcson's work and tries to write her own prose along the same lines. Perhaps a true aficionado of Jackson's work would be able to understand more of the allusions to her work than I could, as her struggles with writing and hints of plot lines are mixed into the story.
I suppose that while I found it an easy, interesting read, I had something of the same reaction I have when reading historical fiction--I can't tell what really happened and what is fiction. Did Shirley's husband really have some role in the disappearance of a student years earlier? DId Shirley know the girl? That is a major plot line that I had an adverse reaction to--the author seemed to be trying to introduce some dark mystery to the tale. But I thought the portrayal of the young couple meeting the academic world, in a time where it seems it was a given that male professors trysted with the students and wives were expected to suffer through it all, was quite well done. And the downward trajectory of the young academic's career was convincing. Year later, the no longer quite so young couple came upon all of Shirley work papers and dove into them, as he thought he might resurrect his career by examining her life and work. There was a fascinating revelation to the narrator found in these papers, that seemed to me to be exactly the sort of eye-opening insight that really happens in life in that it wasn't the clue to the mystery or a great insight into Jackson's soul, but instead a sense of what the narrator had meant to Jackson. I won't spoil the plot, but it is certainly a whimper and not a bang.
I suppose that while I found it an easy, interesting read, I had something of the same reaction I have when reading historical fiction--I can't tell what really happened and what is fiction. Did Shirley's husband really have some role in the disappearance of a student years earlier? DId Shirley know the girl? That is a major plot line that I had an adverse reaction to--the author seemed to be trying to introduce some dark mystery to the tale. But I thought the portrayal of the young couple meeting the academic world, in a time where it seems it was a given that male professors trysted with the students and wives were expected to suffer through it all, was quite well done. And the downward trajectory of the young academic's career was convincing. Year later, the no longer quite so young couple came upon all of Shirley work papers and dove into them, as he thought he might resurrect his career by examining her life and work. There was a fascinating revelation to the narrator found in these papers, that seemed to me to be exactly the sort of eye-opening insight that really happens in life in that it wasn't the clue to the mystery or a great insight into Jackson's soul, but instead a sense of what the narrator had meant to Jackson. I won't spoil the plot, but it is certainly a whimper and not a bang.
July 5, 2019
A very rare 5 star review from me!
Do not fret, fellow Shirley worshippers, the author has done justice to our fair literary witch. The tone is so perfectly matched with our beloved's prose, even while portraying her more unflattering traits.
I want to live in this world ALL the time. This is so well-written, so gorgeously composed, at times I was angry that I didn't write it myself.
Now to address the common question; "do I need to read any of Shirley's works to enjoy this book?" Well first my answer is, you should read her works regardless of this book, but I also say yes, to truly capture the magic properly, I suggest reading the following first: (in no particular order)
*Either (or both!) of her "Momoirs" Raising Demons or Life Among The Savages
*The Haunting of Hill House
*Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer - the PREMIER Shirley biography
*The Lottery and Other Stories and/or (if you must choose) Dark Tales
It sounds like a lot, but I assure you you won't be sorry.
This was a wonderful "surprise" find to extend the ongoing Shirley fog I've been in since reading ALL of her printed works. I will most definitely be reading it again and again. Thank you to Susan Scarf Merrell for bringing Shirley back to us, if only for a little while. 🙏🏼🖤
Oh, and they're making a movie based on this book, and I am anxious to see how it turns out.
Highly recommended!
Do not fret, fellow Shirley worshippers, the author has done justice to our fair literary witch. The tone is so perfectly matched with our beloved's prose, even while portraying her more unflattering traits.
I want to live in this world ALL the time. This is so well-written, so gorgeously composed, at times I was angry that I didn't write it myself.
Now to address the common question; "do I need to read any of Shirley's works to enjoy this book?" Well first my answer is, you should read her works regardless of this book, but I also say yes, to truly capture the magic properly, I suggest reading the following first: (in no particular order)
*Either (or both!) of her "Momoirs" Raising Demons or Life Among The Savages
*The Haunting of Hill House
*Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer - the PREMIER Shirley biography
*The Lottery and Other Stories and/or (if you must choose) Dark Tales
It sounds like a lot, but I assure you you won't be sorry.
This was a wonderful "surprise" find to extend the ongoing Shirley fog I've been in since reading ALL of her printed works. I will most definitely be reading it again and again. Thank you to Susan Scarf Merrell for bringing Shirley back to us, if only for a little while. 🙏🏼🖤
Oh, and they're making a movie based on this book, and I am anxious to see how it turns out.
Highly recommended!
May 14, 2015
Great book. Nailed setting. I truly felt like I was back on campus. I wanted to walk out the back gate and past Powers Market to Kevin's for a burger. I did not want to pass Shirley on my way back. The charge in the air during the whole story kept me fully engaged while being almost terrified at the same time. At times I couldn't put it down (sorry for having my reading light on from 2-4am Meat Eater!) and as soon as I heard about the missing girl I totally freaked out and was actually glad I had my new iphone so I could look it up to confirm that it was exactly what I thought it was. I knew all about the missing girl. I didn't remember her name but was thrilled when I saw that this was the same girl. Brilliant. I so want this to be a true story despite what the publisher is calling fiction.
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