"Intelligent words on one side, and mute genitals on the other ...": Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill's favorite writer is Nabokov - she has commented more than once that Lolita will always be on her 'top ten' list - but it is Nabokov's passion for skewering rare butterflies that immediately comes to mind when I compare the two. Gaitskill's writing is certainly remarkable for its radiant metaphors, but it is the cool precision with which she lays bare her characters' motives that really distinguishes her as a writer. She brings a sort of rigorous anatomical clarity to what is complex, ambiguous, and largely unconscious territory, nailing the unstable combinations of secret reason and unconscious imperative which define the boundaries of her characters' actions and reactions. And much of her work is frankly erotic, exploring themes of humiliation and arousal with clinical detachment, taking us further into certain psychic subtexts than we might ever have thought possible in language.

Her first two collections, Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To were extraordinary expressions of what I considered at the time to be an alienated, sexually broken but defiant soul who brought the torch of her intelligence to a forest of darkness and pain that no other writer knew quite how to navigate. I've since read interviews in which she has expressed surprise at readers who found this sort of material 'dark', and still can't decide whether she is just being obtuse or disingenuous or whether perhaps her 'dark' is something else entirely, but whatever it is, she has evidently moved on some. She's in her late fifties now, married, and secure in her work as a teacher in New York, and her latest collection Don't Cry is not nearly so alienated or extreme. There is still some erotic complication ("When she began to have sex with boys, it was as if she were picking up a doll marked 'Girl' and a doll marked 'Boy' and banging them together, hoping to unite herself") but her characters are gentler, less disturbed, more ordinary; even the deranged Iraq-war veteran is somehow more standard-issue American. Not that her previous characters weren't recognizable as real people. They just weren't recognizable as characters, as signs in the American cultural landscape (excepting Humbert Humbert and Lolita, but they were hardly representative). These newer characters have mellowed out, straightened up - they are college students whose sexual experiences are less kinky, older women who are adopting children, grieving dead husbands, writing, teaching, traveling. But their obscure inner lives are rendered visible in the same way, so the stories still have a faint air of voyeurism about them, of spying on secrets. Her descriptive genius is intact as well. Here's a line from The Little Boy;

"When Megan wet the bed, she would go, half-asleep, to her parents' room, pull off her wet gown, and get between them in her mother's chemise, a little white sardine still fragrant with briny pee."

or from Description;
" ... he had a nightmare in which his mother's breast was a piece of gnawed cake ..."

from Today I'm Yours;
"It was a humid afternoon and the air was heavy with the burnt tang of fresh-laid asphalt and hot salted nuts."

or Mirrorball;
"He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently."

Mirrorball is the stand-out story in the whole collection. It's not the most sophisticated, but the most daring and original - a fresh, peculiar story which in its slight departure from reality takes risks that really pay off. We are back in familiar Gaitskill territory, the one-night stand and its attendant disappointments, but instead of only recording each partner's private calculations and unexpected emotional static, which is quite devastating enough, she goes all the way into full allegorical/metaphysical mode, describing sensations of people who have literally lost or been robbed of their 'souls'. The exquisite detail with which she renders that pain, the weirdly familiar movements of souls in limbo and emptied, anguished persons who do not know what has hit them or what they have lost anchor this flight of imagination to reality as surely as a string held fast anchors a kite, and just as surely bring matters back down to earth when we need to take a closer look. It's the sort of bravura literary performance that has to be experienced, so buy the book for this marvel alone, and then enjoy the rest for the feast of matured insight and continued sparks of genius that it contains.

25th Street

Lorna Sage 'Bad Blood'

Memoirs get a bit of a bad rap in the literary world, but Lorna Sage's story about growing up in fifties' Britain is as skillfully written as anything out there, literary or otherwise, and in certain ways more compelling on account of its status as 'fact'. It is not restricted to personal revelation - it is in some ways quite closed on the subject of the subject - but it opens a window on British essence that is as thoroughly illuminating a treatment as you will ever read. Well-adjusted Britons like to minimize the evidence of their emotional lives - objectivity and irony are national virtues - but they run the risk of seeming remote, imperious, even cruel, because the national virtues are very fine instruments indeed and not everybody knows how to wield them. Lorna Sage is one of the people who knows how, and her witty, dry, absolutely unsentimental account of growing up in a vicarage on the Welsh border with her childish and fragile mother and her spectacularly duelling grandparents, a dirty, defiant child riddled with headlice and in love with books, pregnant at 16 and on the front page of The Daily Mail on her graduation day (as half of the first couple in England to graduate the same class at Durham with Firsts) is the sort of book that makes you understand at last why the British persist in thinking of themselves as great. Her crisp, elegant, perfectly-pitched sentences seem to issue from the fount of a formidable intelligence which has encountered much and assimilated all with infinite composure. She is sensitive to the colloquial nuances of the language, and so the tone of the piece is as modest as it is refined. It is utterly devoid of self-pity, droll, incisive, serene, and curiously representative, insofar as it encompasses both working and educated classes. There isn't even a hint of self regard in the tale, and yet it seems the testament of some sort of aristocrat, a woman who is gifted enough to be able to parse her own narrative and analyze its characters with a pure, almost zen-like detachment. Sometimes the judgements she delivers seem to levitate in an atmosphere devoid of emotional baggage altogether, and yet the story is not without its struggles, its bitter disappointments and sharp angles, its spells of loneliness and boredom and dissatisfaction - the point is, none of these experiences have reduced the impeccable spirit which breathes throughout and the pristine wit which is its messenger by so much as a hair.
None of which says enough about how funny the book is, how delightful, how precise the aim of its tiny darts of irony and pleasure, how fascinating its portrayal of family dynamics, of marriages both bitter and explosive (her grandparents) or selfish and exclusive (her parents) or of the delicately mordant quality generally of its observations on human frailty. Sage was a professor of literature at the University of East Anglia until she died just days after the book won the Whitbread Biography Award in 2001, so perhaps it is her lifetime of teaching and crafting analyses of others' great works that lends her own story its air of modest greatness ... whatever it is, the book deserves its accolades, including those that mark it out as the very best example of what memoir is capable of.