"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.