The Road Through the Wall / Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson

I got on a Shirley Jackson kick late in 2025 and decided to read her novels in the order in which they were published. I finished the first two, The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman, in a row, but other things drew my attention during The Bird’s Nest and so I’ve put it aside for now (not for want of its quality; I’m sure I’ll revisit it later). I’m combining the first two in one entry as I don’t have a ton to say about them individually.

Jackson’s prose is polished from the start, and there is no awkward phrasing or self-conscious overwriting common to new novelists, particularly those writing “literary fiction.” The writing is excellent, but the stories are not yet as strong as they will become. Jackson is, at her core, a short story writer, and in these early books, she doesn’t seem to have fully mastered a lengthier form (something she would ultimately do to tremendous effect with The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Though enigmatic and far from action-packed pulps, those latter works showed a flow and rhythm that suited their length. Her first two, by contrast, can feel formless at times.

The Road Through the Wall feels the least “Jacksonian” of the bunch, which makes sense given it was an early work. the voice is deft and laconic as ever, the dialogue demonstrating the clipped niceties and hostile undercurrents that would become a common thread, but the structure and subject matter are unlike her later works. It isn’t set in New England, for one, but in a sunny California suburb, where it chronicles the lives of half a dozen households, most of Which contain working families with young to teenage children. There is no clear protagonists, and the jumble of names can be hard to keep track of. Not a great deal happens until a sudden and shocking act of violence in the final pages, which feels largely like a contrivance of literary fiction at the time than something authentic to the story.

Hangsaman feels more like vintage Jackson. Common themes emerge here that would find homes in her later novels and stories: the mousey and troubled young woman, the cozy superficial camaraderie of women that betrays sharp angles beneath, the petty theft and intrusion on personal space. There is also a surreal fatalism from the book’s college age protagonist Natalie, which would find a much more impactful resolution in Hill House, The Lottery, and some of her other short stories.

These are still good books and worth reading for those who intend to explore Jackson’s broader body of work. But her final two novels reign supreme. It is a shame she died as young as she did, as all signs point to a writer who was continuing to hone her craft.

The Shame of the States - Albert Deutsch

The Shame of the States is not the book I’d pictured it to be. Having come across a reference to it in Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiaty, I’d imagined it as a kind of proto-gonzo journalism in the vein of Black Like Me, where Deutsch would masquerade as someone with mental health issues in order to expose the deplorable conditions of insane asylums. To be sure, there is an exposé element to The Shame of the States, but it is not one reach through duplicity. Deutsch announced his intentions to every one of the asylums he visits, and stresses that in the majority of cases he was welcomed with open arms.

That is not to say that the conditions he saw were favorable, or that he pulled any punches in his reporting. Rather, it speaks to the desperation in which asylum administrators found themselves—hopelessly underfunded and overworked, with barely trained staff and annual turnover rates approaching 100%—that they willingly exposed the foetid underbellies of their institutions in the hopes that learning of their appalling conditions would shock the public out of complacency, and that their outrage would trickle down to the politicians holding the purse strings.

I can’t say whether Deutsch’s book was successful in that regard, though I can say the picture he paints is vivid and heartbreaking, full of people in restraints or slumped in chairs, of beds filling a room so completely there is no space left to walk around them, of crumbling walls and ceiling bubbling with rot. Deutsch brought a photographer with him to every asylum he visited, and the photos he captured further underscore the squalid conditions of most of these institutions.

Though writing with the restrained, clinical prose of a seasoned journalist for most of his observations, Deutsch cannot restrain his seething anger at the state of affairs he witnesses, and the book contains a number of passages in which he allows himself the freedom to editorialize. The case studies make up the bulk of the text, but the book has other facets as well, making it part history, part journalism, part treatise.

Deutsch’s compassion for his subjects cannot be denied, though the age of the book means that some of the language he uses can be jarring to a modern reader. He refers to people with mental disabilities as “mentally defective” and “feeble-minded,” and regularly throws about the term idiot as a descriptor. People with Down Syndrome are referred to as “Mongolian Idiots.” I admit I cringed a bit at some of these passages, though it’s worth reiterating that Deutsch employs these terms without malice, and that the phrases he uses were at the time blandly clinical. He even makes a point of distinguishing between morons, imbeciles, and idiots, terms that signified increasingly severe levels of cognitive delay. “Idiot” and “moron” have been so thoroughly expunged of their clinical roots, that it is almost impossible to hear them as anything other than insults. Seeing them presented this way is an interesting reminder of how language changes over time.