Description:

' "Of course, no one would want to say anything about a girl like this that's missing..." '

Malice, paranoia and creeping dread lie beneath the surface of ordinary American life in these chilling miniature masterworks of unease.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Review

The most disquieting moment in Shirley Jackson's The Missing Girl arrives not with a scream or a confession but with a list. In the title story, after eleven days of searching for a thirteen-year-old camper at the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen, the Camp Mother, Old Jane, opens her ledgers and reads aloud what Martha Alexander never used: no dining-room tickets, no laundry, no country-dancing privileges, no infirmary visits, no psychiatric services, no vaccination, no vitamin tests. “You see?” says the girl’s uncle to Chief Hook, and the “you see” is addressed as much to the reader as to the small-town policeman who has never investigated a real crime. The inventory does not solve a mystery; it erases the premise that one ever existed. The camp cannot find the girl because the camp’s paper trail — the only durable record of her presence — contains only her name typed onto class lists and the notation “possibly undesirable.” That quiet, ledger-bound revelation is the key signature of this three-story Penguin Modern Classics selection, which gathers “The Missing Girl,” “Journey with a Lady,” and “Nightmare” into a single, quietly devastating argument: the institutional and promotional systems we trust to account for people are not failing to capture a reality that exists elsewhere; they are producing a reality of their own, and the human being inside it may be nothing more than a slot the paperwork left open.

The three stories, originally published in Harper’s (1952), Fantasy and Science Fiction (1957), and the posthumous collection Just an Ordinary Day (1997), arrive in the 2018 Penguin edition as a slim triptych, and to read them together is to watch Jackson dismantle three genres — the missing-person procedural, the child’s adventure, the urban anxiety thriller — by the simple and repeated tactic of withholding the payoff each genre promises. In “The Missing Girl,” the vanished camper is exposed as a paper fiction; in “Journey with a Lady,” the criminal on the train is already in police custody by the time the boy reaches his station; in “Nightmare,” the citywide manhunt is a promotional recruitment drive that planted its quarry from the start. Every story ends not in catharsis but in something closer to an administrative thud, a file closing softly on a desk, and the cumulative effect is to suggest that what is missing in American life is less the occasional person than the very category of a person independent of the systems that name, number, and forget her.

The title story is Jackson’s most sustained anatomy of institutional memory as a collective fiction. Betsy, a thirteen-year-old woodsprite, watches her roommate Martha Alexander leave the bunk one Monday night with a casual “See you later,” and does not report the disappearance for three days. The delay is not malicious; Jackson opens the story with Betsy trying to study while her roommate hums, tightening her shoulders “hoping that her appearance of concentration would somehow communicate a desire for silence,” and the narration dryly notes that “you can’t be cross with her, you just can’t.” That chronic patience — the civilian virtue of not making a fuss — becomes the story’s first indictment: Betsy’s good manners are the lubricant that lets the institution coast through a crisis without ever genuinely registering it. By the time Old Jane summons Chief Hook, an affable family man with no investigative experience, the trail is already a memory of a memory, and the ensuing search — helicopter overflights, a troop of townspeople beating the brush of Bad Mountain, junior counselor Piglet’s vague sighting of a figure ducking behind a tree near Jones Pass — produces no evidence because there was never a girl there to deposit any.

Jackson builds the search through a pastiche of interviews, each one a miniature of institutional self-exculpation. The librarian Miss Mills, doubling as the Snark, tells Chief Hook that “one girl is much like another, at this age. Their unformed minds, their unformed bodies, their little mistakes.” Nature-study counselor Little John volunteers, “I have an awfully good memory for faces,” but cannot supply a single verifiable fact. The swimming instructor Tarzan points out that fifty girls in white bathing caps are indistinguishable. The painting counselor is “almost sure” Martha had a canvas. No two recollections match, and the accumulating impression is not of a cover-up but of a system that never needed to differentiate one girl from another in the first place. When Martha’s uncle finally arrives and quietly asks how many children his sister actually has, the enumeration of the Alexander siblings — Helen, Jane, Mabel, a brother in Denver — exposes the numerical slot Martha once occupied, and Old Jane’s records do the rest. The girl was a name on a roster, and the camp’s machinery of dining tickets, laundry, golf-course privileges, and vitamin tests had been humming along perfectly well without her. A body that might have been hers turns up a year later, “stuffed away among some thorn bushes” and discovered by two boys seeking a cowboy hideout, but the body is buried without positive identification, and Betsy, now a senior huntsman, cannot recognize the clothes. “It was impossible to say, of course, how the girl had been killed,” Jackson writes, and that “of course” is the story’s final, withering shrug — the genre’s corpse denied a name, the mystery refused the dignity of a victim.

If “The Missing Girl” dissects institutional forgetting, “Journey with a Lady” examines what happens when a child brushes against adult transgression and the adult world quietly reseals the surface. Nine-year-old Joe Wilson boards a train alone to his grandfather’s farm, armed with comic books, chocolate, a dollar bill, and the self-congratulatory refrain “This is the life, boy.” When a woman who calls herself Mrs. John Aldridge takes the seat beside him and, after a policeman sweeps the car, cheerfully announces that she has stolen two thousand dollars from her employer and spent it on a two-week spree in Ashville, Joe’s response is not fright but delight. “Stole some money,” she says, and grins. “I knew all the time they’d catch me, of course. But it was worth it!” The boy, thrilled, treats her as a glamorous outlaw; they share a meal in the dining car and discuss Joe’s own theft of a dime from his mother’s purse, and the story settles into a conspiratorial warmth between a child and a woman who has, for a few train-compartment hours, stepped outside the rules.

Jackson keeps the tone light, almost comic, and the story’s power lies in the landing. At Merrytown, Grandpop meets Joe on the platform, and the boy sees the woman being escorted away by the policeman. “Probably her brother or something,” Grandpop says, and when he asks “Anything happen?” Joe’s reply is the story’s final, elliptical sentence: “Saw a boy sitting on a fence. I didn’t wave to him, though.” That sentence, freighted with a melancholy the child cannot voice, is a small masterpiece of compression. It tells us that something did happen — an encounter with an adult freedom the boy had no name for, and with the adult world’s instinct to call a policeman a brother — and that the encounter has been sealed off, lodged in the story as the fence-boy Joe didn’t wave to. The story refuses to turn Joe’s journey into a lesson; it merely records the small, sad quiet where a lesson would have been.

“Nightmare” completes the triptych by pushing the logic of the manufactured event to its furthest and most unsettling conclusion. Miss Toni Morgan, a meticulous Manhattan receptionist whose selfhood is built on precision — the blue hat set at the correct angle, the gloves tucked in the pocketbook, the memorandum pad on the desk — is asked by her employer Mr. Lang to deliver a package across town when the other receptionist, Miss Fishman, calls in sick. She replies “Not at all” with “an extremely clear inflection,” registering the small institutional indignity without complaint. But as she walks through the city, a sound truck begins broadcasting a description that matches her exactly: “a blue hat with a red feather, a reddish tweed topcoat, and blue shoes … carrying a large package.” The citywide “Find Miss X” campaign — offering a mink coat, a house, a yacht, fifty thousand dollars — has described an outfit, and Toni Morgan is wearing it. Or rather, the description has produced the woman, and the woman has been walking through the city under the impression that she was merely running an errand.

Jackson stages the pursuit as a slow net-tightening. The sound truck describes her; a poster she reads aloud repeats the description; a man with a microphone narrates her progress in real time (“Miss X is now wearing her coat buttoned up … she’s taken off her gloves”); finally a full parade — bands, floats, twelve girls dressed as Miss X, twelve men carrying identical packages — blocks the street. Exhausted, she retreats into a shoe-repair shop, where a man in a blue suit asks, “Are you Miss X?” and, when she wearily says yes, tells her the town “stinks” because no one spotted her, that the car is outside, and that they will do it again tomorrow in Chicago. That night in a hotel, she abandons Mr. Lang’s package and her hatbox and, “Smiling, she pulled the satin quilt up to her chin and fell asleep.” The smile is the story’s darkest detail: Miss Morgan has not been defeated so much as recruited, her old identity as a careful office self shed as easily as the abandoned package, her new role as Miss X accepted with the same equanimity she once brought to answering the telephone. The system has not caught an unwilling quarry; it has auditioned and hired a willing performer, and the entire citywide hunt was the job interview.

The three stories share a method: close third-person irony, that signature Jackson mode in which the reader sees more than the protagonist and the ordinary accumulates into menace without announcement. In “The Missing Girl,” Jackson deploys pastiche dialogue and deadpan exposition that mimics oral testimony, while the counselors’ names — Little John, Tarzan, Bluebird, Piglet, Will Scarlett, and Miss Mills alias “the Snark” — dress the camp as a nursery-rhyme space that is simultaneously a bureaucratic engine incapable of distinguishing one girl from another. The dramatic production Martha was supposedly rehearsing, “Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil,” is a title that sounds like a lost fairy tale but signifies nothing, much like Martha Alexander herself. In “Journey with a Lady,” the child’s point of view lets Jackson hold the line between adventure and disenchantment without resolving it; Joe’s inward flinch — “Little boy, Joe told himself bitterly, on top of everything else, little boy” — registers his dawning awareness that he is being condescended to, but the story refuses to name what he is losing. In “Nightmare,” the recurrence of the “Find Miss X” refrain functions less as sound effect than as a formal device that progressively narrows the protagonist’s field of movement, until the final “Are you Miss X?” feels less surprising than depressingly inevitable. Across all three, the dominant structural choice is the anti-climax as form. The missing girl is a clerical error; the embezzler is caught before the train even arrives; the manhunt is a publicity stunt. Each story converts a genre premise into a quiet lesson about the inadequacy of the categories we use to read ordinary American life, and the collection, taken as a whole, becomes a kind of anti-mystery — a book in which nothing is found because the question of what was there to be found has been quietly disabled.

This refusal places Jackson in an intellectual lineage the volume’s own packaging underscores. The Penguin Modern Classics back matter positions these stories alongside works by Borges, Calvino, Camus, and Nabokov — writers who explored the architecture of bureaucratic unreason — and the volume naturally speaks the language of the absurdist tradition. The camp’s ledgers are the administrative cousin of a court that never specifies the charge, and the sound-truck repetition in “Nightmare” channels the literature of impersonal systems that absorb individuals into circuits of classification and promotion. The counselors’ cheerful inability to remember a particular girl reads like a field report from the mid-century critique of organizational life, in which the dutiful specialist loses the connection between her role and the human fact it once referred to. But Jackson is also working squarely within her own American Gothic lineage: the camp, the train compartment, and the Manhattan sidewalk are the same sunlit, safe settings that tilt into menace without a single supernatural door slam, the way the village square in “The Lottery” or the front drive of Hill House do. What makes The Missing Girl particularly contemporary, however, is its anticipation of the pseudo-event — the promotional campaign that manufactures the very quarry it claims to be seeking. The “Find Miss X” apparatus, with its pre-written description, its planted winner, and its handler who complains that the city “stinks” because no one spotted her, is a mid-twentieth-century sketch of the logic that would later animate reality television and viral marketing. Jackson, writing in 1952, had already grasped that a publicity hunt depends on the public’s willingness to believe it is spontaneously finding someone, when it is in fact merely moving its own recruit from city to city, and the story’s quiet outrage lies in how readily Miss Morgan says yes.

The collection is not without its constraints, and a reader who comes to it expecting the immersive atmospheric dread of The Haunting of Hill House or the layered psychological portraiture of We Have Always Lived in the Castle may find these three stories, gathered posthumously from mid-century magazines, more gestural than fully realized. “Journey with a Lady,” for all its charm, risks slightness; Joe’s encounter with Mrs. Aldridge has the concision of a sketch, and the closing fence-boy image, while evocative, leans heavily on a reticence that leaves the story’s emotional center somewhat oblique. “Nightmare” reaches its resolution with a swiftness that feels inevitable in retrospect but may strike a first-time reader as abrupt — the man in the blue suit materializes, Miss Morgan says yes, and the story is over before the full strangeness of her absorption has settled. And the title story, for all its brilliant architecture of bureaucratic evaporation, presents a case that is literally a nullity: the girl was never there, and a body that might have been hers is discovered offstage, buried in a subordinate clause. That is a daring formal wager, but it means the story’s dramatic weight rests entirely on the institutional satire, and the pathos of a child who might have existed somewhere, in some other ledger, is never allowed to leak through. These are complaints, however, about a volume that does exactly what Jackson’s best work has always done: it refuses the consolations of narrative closure, and it insists that the real disturbance is not the violent event but the system that never needed the missing person to be a person in the first place.

What The Missing Girl offers, in fewer than sixteen thousand words, is a concentrated exposition of a theme that runs through Jackson’s entire oeuvre — the gap between what institutions record and what exists, between the public memory that can be assembled after a fact and the private fact that may never have existed at all. It is a book for readers who find the quiet dismantling of genre more unsettling than any monster, and for anyone who has ever sat at a desk and wondered whether the person the file describes is somebody they have actually met. The three stories together compose a small, precise, and quietly devastating triptych about the emptiness at the center of the forms we fill out, and that is an achievement no amount of plot would improve.