I have never read anything like HANGSAMAN. It is chilling, hyper-surreal, and told with a mind-altering narrative voice. HANGSAMAN is like shooting a cocktail of vodka and meth: it's weird, burns like hell, and you don't come down from those fever dreams the same person you were before the experience.
The most amazing thing about HANGSAMAN is that, on the surface, nothing happens. A girl, Natalie, attends a dinner party where she is possibly assaulted, starts college, drinks a lot of martinis with professors, and goes on long, thought-addled walks. This doesn't even sound like a story worth reading, and that's where Jackson works some voodoo. She manages to create a dense atmosphere of isolation that permeates the spaces between the non-events. Even the trauma that triggers Natalie's increasingly strange psychological break doesn't "happen" in the usual sense of events unfolding on a page. Instead, Jackson gives the reader access to only the reverberations of the event. This is either a masterful literary technique, or dark magic, and I'm placing bets on the latter.
The story received through the twisted and unreliable narrator who recites Natalie's thoughts is fascinating, in the way a fish hook piercing flesh is sickly fascinating. Natalie doesn't fit in, and the details of life in an all-girls dorm is unimpeachable, including the strange spate of random thefts. Several girls report being slapped awake in the middle of the night, but are too startled to identify the culprit. Is it Natalie, slapping and stealing? There are plenty of clues it probably, maybe is - but HANGSAMAN is not a novel of absolutes. Jackson litters the work with half-hints I read with the excitement of discovering something amazingly rare in a pile of moldering leaves. For example, Natalie writes gut-wrenching letters home to her father, but the missives may or may not have been intercepted by her mother. Natalie may or may not be in a sexual relationship with a girl in the dorm, or Natalie may or may not "simply" have an alternate personality brought on by the trauma that we never see directly.
The narrator is a wily one, and it is unclear where Natalie ends and the narrator begins. The two bleed into one another until you cannot distinguish your vantage within the story. This is part of Jackson's dark magic: she gives you direct access to the experience of a deeply disturbed mind, but without the gimmicky feel of first person. Indeed, having an "I" in HANGSAMAN would change the texture of the work, damage it irreparably. Natalie's entire problem is she has no idea who she is, and just as she was on the cusp of discovery, trauma knocked her from being a bit overly imaginative into being batshit crazy. Natalie has no "I," and Jackson wisely steers clear of trying to force one. Jackson leverages the strange, blended narrative persona to excellent effect right from the opening scenes. A detective "interrogates" Natalie… in her mind. It is only on a second (or third) read that it sinks in that the exchange between Natalie and her imaginary detective is so very, very strange because the detective is prescient. His questions can be applied to multiple situations that arise throughout the novel, and it is illuminating that at the time the questions are shared with the reader, they are entirely out of context. In some sense, it feels like Natalie's future self (the narrator?) is interjecting thoughts back into the past. It exacerbates the disorientation HANGSAMAN inspires, and it resonates with the strange psychology in us all.
HANGSAMAN is a bizarre, nightmare trance. I came up from reading it feeling deeply affected, infected. The prose warped my mind. I found myself thinking like the narrator reporting Natalie's musings; it was disturbing. HANGSAMAN is not a book for anyone on the brink of a mental breakdown. It is a dangerous beast. It will swallow you whole. It is frightfully unique, and one of the most masterful novels I've experienced.
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Top reviews from other countries
Maelen Moonsinger
Not quite perfect yet, but very good.
Reviewed in Canada on January 25, 2023
S. B. Kelly
Not sure what to make of this
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 28, 2020