Notes on Shirley Jackson and New Yorker story by Greg Jackson

Two notes: Greg Jackson has a story, Poetry, int he current New Yorker that shows this writer - unknown to me, and it's nice to see the NYer on a run of publishing stories by little-known/debut writers - to be super-smart, an excellent stylist, a wielder of a daunting vocabulary (sent me to my online dictionary a few times). In essence, the story is about a young man and his partner - I think they're married - on a vacation to what seems to be a French-language Caribbean island: They spend a difficult morning climbing the island volcano, which exposes many of the flaws in their testy relationship, then some hours on the beach that give the narrator/protagonist ample opportunity for reflection on a variety of topics and on the tenuous and perhaps unraveling relationship w/ wife/girlfriend, and finally a near-disastrous encounter with illness. All told, Poetry is one of those stories that has many fine moments and apercus, that really gets at the tensions and hidden fault lines in a relationship, that has some beautiful passages as well as some that are hard to decipher, and suffers from one grievous flaw: Much of the story entails their eating tropical apple that has fallen onto the beach (he begins eating it and passes it to wife/girlfriend, a reversal of Adam/Eve?), which makes them both violently ill. So you have to wonder: Who in the world picks up and eats fallen fruit on a Caribbean beach? Wouldn't there be warning signs or at least wouldn't his solicitous island host have said that the fallen apples are poisonous? And once, back in their rental, he looks up the fruit and finds that it can be not only poisonous but fatal - who in his/her right mind would just go off and go out for some drinks? Who wouldn't get immediate medical attention? Seriously.

On another matter on another Jackson, the always-perceptive Laura Miller writes a fine introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, noting, as I did in yesterday's post, that the novel entirely centers on the consciousness of Eleanor, so much so that we have suspect that the ghostly visions may be in her own head (although this does not explain the handful of visions that other but not Eleanor see). LM notes correctly that this novel is a descendant of Turn of the Screw, w/ many similarities, including the uncertainty about haunting and the vulnerable young woman as protagonist. Miller has some smart things to say as well about the relationship between the two women leads - Eleanor and Theo - including a discussion of Theo's likely lesbian sexuality. She emphasizes, more than I did, and I think she's right, the deperate loneliness of Eleanor and how the entire journey is her (failed) attempt to break free from an enclosed, unhappy life as an outsider.