The Art of Mystery by Maud Casey

Author:Maud Casey [Casey, Maud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-985-0
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Spoiler alert. Everyone else in her family is dead because she killed them. Jackson never gives us a reason for Merricat’s homicidal impulses. Often Merricat imagines wishing other people dead, just so she can walk on their bodies. She is full of superstitions—repeating talismanic phrases to herself, making pronouncements such as that Thursday is her “most powerful day,” nailing books to trees, and burying her dolls. She has fashioned a world of magical spells and obsessive rituals to fend off … what, exactly? The worst has happened. All she wants is to live with her long-suffering sister Constance, who doesn’t allow Merricat to prepare other people’s foods (because she, you know, poisoned the whole family), while shielding her as best she can from yet another of Shirley Jackson’s unruly mobs of villagers looking for the slightest excuse to stone someone to death. “Slowly,” Merricat tells us from the creepy house on the hill where she’s holed up with Constance, “the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.”

She’s a hard sell if likability is the measure, and you definitely wouldn’t want to invite her to dinner. She’s not going to provide a role model for how to live, and if you’re reading to find a friend, she’s not it. So what is Jackson offering us instead? Before you know it, you’ve lost track of the forest for the trees (to which Merricat’s nailed all those books). Jackson seduces you with Merricat’s strange, jump-cut way of speaking, and soon you’re cocooned in the sticky logic of Merricat’s world. You suspect from the start that she’s the murderess (so I feel less bad for spoiling it for you). But her murderousness is not the main attraction here. The why of it all is not what interests Jackson. It’s not that the novel is uninterested in morality; it’s just much more interested in the music of Merricat’s voice. An eerie sensibility roils underneath its surface, the twisted song of a feral, childish young woman who has committed the thing most of us wouldn’t even cop to fantasizing about. A twist on the twisted. A Philip Larkin poem, squared: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” So poison them.

In Merricat, Jackson has created an opportunity for us to dwell in the presence of a character who is an absurd amplification of our unspoken desires. She takes us to a place we might not otherwise even know how to get to and makes us look. Merricat is troubling, frightening, thrilling, and utterly perplexing. Why did she do that? Merricat, to put it mildly, does not behave the way we might expect or want her to. But this isn’t about us, is it? Jackson brings us into the presence of Merricat’s mystery.

Fiction is a rare opportunity, an occasion, for us to be led out on a perch outside the cage of self for a little bit. We are enticed onto that perch by characters (like Welty’s narrator) who force us to

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