I have never been a big fan of short stories. When younger son took a course in American short stories in college (simply because they matched his interest span), I discovered that Alexie Sherman excelled in this genre. A couple other stories in his anthology also convinced me that it is almost like writing a haiku to pack so much into so few pages.
Shirley Jackson is a good short story writer. The Lottery runs all of 32 pages ... it seemed a waste of effort to bind and print it separate from a larger collection, but things were different in 1983 with small publishing houses. The suburban library branch that sent the book over to my branch also categorizes The Lottery as young adult (when will I escape this nomenclature?). What a dour theme to put before high school students? Jackson creates a friendly small town, populated with neighbors who enjoy their annual community event. But while depicting this Eden, Jackson lays enough atmospherics down on paper to foretell that all will not end well.
My next couple of reviews venture into reading Charles Murray and Steve Pinker so I am looking at Jackson's story both from a sociological class struggle and from an incidence in violence perspective. Why is this sacrifice condoned? Who benefits? Have cultural habits overtaken thought? Will this tradition go on forever? Won't the town die out? Why doesn't anyone want to leave? Can't the populace calculate risk?
I find it most ironic, and probably was Jackson's intent, that the story is named The Lottery. I am surrounded by fellow employees who pool money for every mega-millions drawing; large pay outs are the talk of the elevators. These folk have the same blind faith in their numbers coming up for the good as Jackson's characters do expecting to dodge a more dire fate. I want to tie this theme of acceding into blind luck rather than self-determination into those ideas explored in The Phantom Toll Booth and A Wrinkle in Time, both of which stress an individual's capacity to make their own world and excel in it. The people in The Lottery might as well be those under the domain of IT, without self-determination and worshiping the wheel of fortune.
A book that was interesting but only because of its serendipitous placement against the other books I've read the past few weeks.
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