The Road Through the Wall (1948) By Shirley Jackson

 

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.