![]() ![]() “My ambitions for you are slowly being realized, and, even though you are unhappy, console yourself with the thought that it was part of my plan for you to be unhappy for a while. ![]() Only now, having finished the book, do I begin to feel as though I understand what kind of novel I’m reading, and even so I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find out I’m completely wrong-that a wild supernatural twist happened and I missed it, that Natalie’s father’s been dead since the first page, or something. (Like, for the heroine to be chased through campus by terrifying figures in white robes, which happens on the cover but not, in fact, in the novel.) It took me a long time to accept the book for what it was and settle into its peculiar rhythms, following poor Natalie Waite as she comes completely unhinged in her proper northeastern college for women. My mass-market of Hangsaman was packaged for 1950s readers as a traditional spine-tingler-“AN UNFORGETTABLE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE,” reads the front cover, “FROM THE AUTHOR OF ‘WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE,’ ETC.”-and I spent much of the novel expecting something gruesome to happen at every turn, the way it would in a contemporary Gothic. ![]()
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