Shirley: A Novel Paperback – July 7, 2015

"I thought girls outgrow their passion for Shirley Jackson novels around the time they give up riding horses and start having sex," a professor casually said to me one day when I was 19. He was eating a bagel with cream cheese and some of the cream cheese had gotten stuck to his graying beard.I was an English major and I'd wanted to write a paper about unreliable narrators in novels, narrators you can't quite trust. And I'd thought Shirley Jackson's novels "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" and "The Haunting of Hill House" would be perfect. It devastated me to see the contempt my professor had for Shirley Jackson.What did I say back to my professor? Probably nothing. Probably I just scratched Shirley Jackson's name off my list of acceptable authors and profusely apologized for daring to speak Shirley Jackson's name in the same sentence as Nabokov's and James Joyce's.The first time I'd come across Shirley Jackson's writing was in junior high when our class read "The Lottery." Usually, the stories we read in our literature book in 8th grade bored me. They were such NICE stories, suitable for NICE children. But there was nothing NICE about "The Lottery." The story hit me like a slap in the face and I looked around my classroom suspiciously, suddenly aware that inside each of us was something kind of....well, exciting and...WICKED.Anyhow, if you were ever one of those girls who loved Shirley Jackson, or a BOY who loved Shirley Jackson, or simply someone looking for a good novel to read this summer, I highly recommend Susan Scarf Merrell's brilliant SHIRLEY A NOVEL. It's this beautifully written, psychologically gripping story of a 19-year-old pregnant, nervous, UNRELIABLE young wife who moves in with Shirley Jackson and her literary critic husband, the lascivious, dazzling Stanley Edgar Hyman. It's the kind of novel you can't put down, the kind of novel where you laugh one moment, and take sharp breaths the next and keep saying to yourself "I've got to go to sleep but no, no, just one more chapter. JUST ONE MORE"I think you'll love experiencing Shirley Jackson as a fascinating, memorable, exciting and oh so real fictional character. Even if you don't ride horses any more. Even if you have actually had sex!

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.

Quite poor taste to write a novel depicting a real fellow writer as a murderess. The real Shirley is not alive to defend her reputation, but her children are, and this hurts them.

I plodded through to the end but grudgingly. Perhaps if I knew more about Jackson’s work it would have been interesting? I found the writing to be pedestrian, the characters caricatures, and the plot thin. Could not recommend.