Envying Shirley.

The postman brought me a present today – my second novel by Shirley Jackson. This one is called We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 

 

Consensus would apparently have it that it’s her best, and it was recommended to me by Mrs Nancy K of upstate New York. Thank you, Nancy (and I would be grateful if somebody would tell me whether ‘upstate’ should take an uppercase U when it’s part of the name of a region. My instinct suggests that it shouldn’t, but my instinct is based on the UK model and the American model might be different.) But back to the book:

I’ve only read the first few pages so far (because I spent some time counting the words on one page in order to calculate the word count of the whole book, the reason for which I needn’t go into) and I have a problem. My problem is that I get it too well. I understand the nuances; I see and feel the character of Mary Katherine Blackwood – presumably the main protagonist; I recognise the subtle undercurrent of dry humour. And then I begin to feel a mild and pointless sense of regret that I never wrote something like this. My fiction was always presented in the form of rich, descriptive, but conventional prose. My first aim was always to establish a sense of place, my second to emulate the tonal balance and flow of traditional English literature. The plot came third – and plot surely has its place – but there was never anything oddball about it. Shirley Jackson does oddball quite delightfully, and I’m a little envious. My blog occasionally slips into oddball mode (in fact, I’m reasonably sure that people reading it sometimes do so with a questioning frown and a shake of the head) but my fiction never did.

So is my sense of regret justified? Clearly not. We all have to have our own style and our own voice. Just because I can do oddball when the mood takes me doesn’t mean I was somehow deficient by not using it in my fiction. Somebody once said that if there’s one thread running through my stories, it is the normalising of the paranormal. It would be hard to imagine how oddball diversions would have accorded with such a process. And maybe Shirley Jackson knew more oddball people than I have; maybe she was more oddball than me; maybe the drawing of psychological aspects of character was more important to her. And the universal consensus would obviously hold that she was a better writer anyway.

That’s all fine. We use such talents as we have to the best of our ability, and the rest is the road not travelled. No such thing, so no regrets.