Shirley Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall, is semi-biographical. It
is about a young girl named Harriet growing up in post-WWII suburban America, a
unifying theme in Jackson’s early novels and short stories. Later in her career
Jackson would turn to horror topics including her best-known work The Haunting
of Hill House, which has been adapted numerous times for movies and
television shows.
While Harriet
is the main character in The Road Through the Wall, there is a large contingent
of “others” in the book, her neighborhood friends, classmates, siblings galore,
and their nemeses the parents. I think the word “generic” applies to the kids, and to the personal goals set for them by their parents. Just pages into the
book I already had the folk song Little Boxes playing in the back of my
head, written & composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and made famous by Pete
Seeger, and used more recently as the theme song of Showtime’s serial Weeds.
Little Boxes sung by Pete Seeger
The novel
includes several interesting little side stories amongst the ordinary days,
mixed in with the never-ending dynamics of who is part of the “in crowd” and
who is not, and why, told at the level of the children, and also at the level
of the parents. At the top end of this us and them scale, and uncontested, was
the distinction between homeowners and renters.
One of the
side stories is of Harriet being persuaded into visiting a Chinese man her
friend Virginia met while shopping in town. Harriet knew her parents would not
approve of visiting an adult man, rather on a Chinese one. Yet, they went
anyway, though they nearly canceled at the last moment out of fear of the
unknown. The meeting, with tea and cookies, turned out to be eye opening,
multi-cultural, interesting, and without incident. Among other things, the girls
discover the man lives in the house as a servant, not as the proprietor – a
class distinction handed down to them from their parents. The girls do not visit a second time.
Another
interesting side story is the decision by the adults in the neighborhood to
start a Shakespeare reading program for the kids. Without objection (or even
the notion of an objection), the program organizer announced his decision to not invite Harriet’s friend
Marilyn to participate in the program. Marilyn is Jewish and lives in a rental. He explains this exclusion by stating he did not want to
offend Marilyn by subjecting her to a reading of The Merchant of Venice.
Throughout
the storylines, everyone is in high dudgeon because a subdivision is being built
next to theirs, and they will have no say in what “class” of people will be
moving in, possibly harming the desirability of the neighborhood. Currently, a
wall exists between the new and the established, though the developer had indicated the
wall is coming down, streets and sidewalks will be connected with theirs, new
kids will be in the school system.
The novel
concludes when a 3-year-old girl dies near a hole in that wall. No one knows if
it was an accident, a murder, or what.
Recommendation: Yes, though I have read this theme before.
