New Yorker Fiction Review #247: "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson
I'm not real impressed with The New Yorker's decision to publish "The Lottery," what I consider to be a halfway decent but overrated and by now irrelevant piece of short fiction -- originally published in the magazine in 1948 -- inside an issue that dealt with much more intellectually challenging, thought-provoking, and socially relevant topics.
The July 27th issue of The New Yorker was an archival issue -- and a really, really good issue at that, with timely stories on civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez, author Toni Morrison, AIDS activist Larry Kramer, and others -- so I guess they can be forgiven for publishing a short story most of us had forced down our throats at least twice before we even got out of high school.
If you have never read or heard of "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson, you either didn't go to high school in America or you skipped a lot of school. There's also (I guess) the chance your school just didn't teach it, but the story is in just about every anthology of American short fiction so I find that hard to believe. Not saying you're delinquent in some way for not having read this story, just saying it was almost impossible to get out of the 20th century U.S. educational system without having read it.
Why, then, in an archival issue packed with very poignant articles centering on civil rights, civil rights leaders, racial injustice issues, climate issues, and gender politics didn't The New Yorker choose to publish a short story in keeping with that theme? Surely there had to be a previously-published short story from the pages of the magazine dealing with some aspect of racial justice or civil rights. I can probably think of a few off the top of my head.
The answer, of course, is that the movie Shirley (about the life of Shirley Jackson) was recently released and I'm guessing (again, just a wild guess as I actually have no idea how The New Yorker operates other than that I've been reading it faithfully for 10 years) the magazine in cahoots with the publicist for the film. Especially since the film was reviewed a few weeks ago with a full-length review. I mean...could it be a coincidence? Absolutely not.
So, I'm not going to sit here and "review" this (pretty good but nowhere near as great as it is made out to be) short story as though it was the first time I read it and not the 15th. I mean, it's a good short story. It moves fast. It has a good plot and a really creative plot twist. It's also making a very subtle (or very blunt, depending on how you read it) point about the backwardness and herd-mentality of middle-America during Jackson's time. And I understand it caused quite an uproar when it was released.
But the fact is, it's an artifact at this point. And, in my opinion, it's The New Yorker again letting its deals with agents and publicists get in the way of its editorial direction, something which publications -- as businesses with expenses, budgets, sponsors, investors -- have to contend with in a time when print publishing is limping along into the 21st century like an old jalopy with three wheels and no gas left in the tank straight toward a sign that says "Danger - Bridge Out."
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