Hangsaman

Natalie lives in an ordinary world, but as it passes through the filter of her eyes and is processed by her brain, she interprets the world as either painfully banal or frighteningly strange. The ramblings of her imagination sputter along throughout the book, interrupting moments and pulling the reader along by a rough hand on digressions of fancy. What's the point? Who knows, certainly not Natalie.

The plot is more or less three loosely connected events or transitions, having little to do with one another but at times passingly referenced. Natalie is so internal and her thoughts so tangential that at times it isn't clear what is reality and what is not — but never so opaque that you lose a thread completely. Jackson is not writing Natalie as a narrator, rather a narrator observes Natalie and that at least keeps some ground under our feet.

Still, I found myself struggling to hang on. The first half of the book is rather boring. I felt similarly with “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” — and thought, if I just hang on, there will be some moment that changes everything. I wondered to myself, “this is a book that'd probably be better on a reread, events would take on a different meaning after the inevitable conclusion.” Yet, I'm skeptical that this is true.

What ultimately kept me reading is Jackson's prose, which is quite good even when it says nothing and communicates no plot at all. Often there are writerly jokes that will give the literary snob a good chuckle, and these were good enough to keep me reading, though it was a labor.