A review by orange_eating_class
The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson
4.0
Already in the prologue of her first novel, Shirley Jackson demonstrates an interest in a topic that she would return to again and again, as she explores the homes of the families on one suburban Californian street in 1936, with incisive observations conveyed in beautifully written prose that will be familiar to anyone familiar with her descriptions of Hill House, the mansions in We Have Always Lived in the Castle or The Sundial, or the museum in The Bird's Nest. However, there are about a dozen houses on Pepper Street, the setting of our story, and Jackson's cast of characters is far more extensive than in her later novels, probably to the detriment of this one. Of course, the inhabitants of a small suburban street will be familiar with the geography of their environs, but it's a lot for a reader to keep track of in one short novel.
But this is a small issue with the book, given Jackson's brilliant portrayal of how suburban life replicates and passes on its values to younger generations. We see not only the foibles, bigotries, and nosiness of Pepper Street's adults, but also the ways in which the this moral ugliness is inculcated in their children. The mostly well-off children of Pepper Street learn to associate the material solidity of their circumstances with superiority to the poor, how to be reflexively racist and anti-Semitic, and, especially, how to blame girls and women for any sexual behavior deemed indecent. What's so unique about Jackson's portrayal of this is how she demonstrates the preservation of these values through phatic gestures and little rituals (my favorite passage of the entire novel involves the neighborhood children and a recently fired teenage maid playing a game that involves trying to make one another laugh by spouting silly nonsense, which actually functions as a means of social stratification). The content of these modes of communication may be incredibly trite or even nonsensical, and the forms themselves may change, all as long as they continue to perpetuate the social mores of their class.
And yet amidst all that is preserved, Pepper Street also experiences significant change, although, as in all of Jackson's novels, it fails to radically change anything truly fundamental in the lives of most of the people who live on Pepper Street. Though a sizable majority of them may be well-off or even rich, the inhabitants of Pepper Street do not truly control their own destinies. They have no say, for instance, in a wall between themselves and an adjacent street being torn down to make room for a new apartment complex. And this vulnerability, in addition to the fact that tragedy can strike even the very comfortable, could be the basis for solidarity with the less comfortable, such as the sequence of poor families moving cycling through a house-for-rent on Pepper Street. But this possibility is precluded by the narrow-mindedness instilled in these suburbanites by their mode of socialization from childhood onwards. It's a pessimistic view of society, but Jackson has yet to be proven wrong in this pessimism about the likelihood of radical egalitarian change in America, and in this respect The Road Through the Wall, though it may be set in over 80 years ago, is nearly as timely a work as later masterpieces such as The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
But this is a small issue with the book, given Jackson's brilliant portrayal of how suburban life replicates and passes on its values to younger generations. We see not only the foibles, bigotries, and nosiness of Pepper Street's adults, but also the ways in which the this moral ugliness is inculcated in their children. The mostly well-off children of Pepper Street learn to associate the material solidity of their circumstances with superiority to the poor, how to be reflexively racist and anti-Semitic, and, especially, how to blame girls and women for any sexual behavior deemed indecent. What's so unique about Jackson's portrayal of this is how she demonstrates the preservation of these values through phatic gestures and little rituals (my favorite passage of the entire novel involves the neighborhood children and a recently fired teenage maid playing a game that involves trying to make one another laugh by spouting silly nonsense, which actually functions as a means of social stratification). The content of these modes of communication may be incredibly trite or even nonsensical, and the forms themselves may change, all as long as they continue to perpetuate the social mores of their class.
And yet amidst all that is preserved, Pepper Street also experiences significant change, although, as in all of Jackson's novels, it fails to radically change anything truly fundamental in the lives of most of the people who live on Pepper Street. Though a sizable majority of them may be well-off or even rich, the inhabitants of Pepper Street do not truly control their own destinies. They have no say, for instance, in a wall between themselves and an adjacent street being torn down to make room for a new apartment complex. And this vulnerability, in addition to the fact that tragedy can strike even the very comfortable, could be the basis for solidarity with the less comfortable, such as the sequence of poor families moving cycling through a house-for-rent on Pepper Street. But this possibility is precluded by the narrow-mindedness instilled in these suburbanites by their mode of socialization from childhood onwards. It's a pessimistic view of society, but Jackson has yet to be proven wrong in this pessimism about the likelihood of radical egalitarian change in America, and in this respect The Road Through the Wall, though it may be set in over 80 years ago, is nearly as timely a work as later masterpieces such as The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle.