"A Romantic Weekend" (1988)

Story by Mary Gaitskill not available online.

This story comes from Mary Gaitskill's first collection, Bad Behavior, and it's more overt about the sexual kink she often writes about, BDSM, a complicated acronym you should look up for further tediously detailed discussion. Told third-person omniscient, "A Romantic Weekend" goes inside the heads of both its characters, an unnamed man who calls himself a sadist, and Beth, his mistress for the time being (he is married), who calls herself a masochist. Among other things, the story has a firm grip on the terrible foibles of these relationships, which come of projection, incoherence, and other poor interpersonal skills. "What do you want to do?" Beth asks the man during their all-night flight on the weekend trip in question. "I can't just come out and tell you," he says. "It would ruin it." And therein lies a primary rub of sexual relationships, not just BDSM. We want our partners to just know. Explaining things spoils it all. At the same time, the reports Gaitskill makes from inside the man's head point to what Beth finally realizes. He is a dangerous moron. He wants to beat her, torture her—he feels like an overprivileged 14-year-old. He doesn't appear to derive any pleasure, for the most part, and what he consciously seeks is closer to a porny fantasy of snuff: "With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his." This is a remarkable formulation of at least one projected mindset of the sadist, or top, or dom, but it's off. (All definitions are off a little in this realm.) The story seems to be straining after something much more dangerous as well, the mindset of a serial killer say, or at least sociopath. But this character's translation of it, perhaps exactly because of the malevolence, is also infantile and silly, closer to the kind of dominating that literally an infant would exert (see also: Donald Trump), which in turn is based on the humoring goodwill of its caretaker. You see how quickly it becomes so complicated. The man in this story is mostly unpleasant, particularly in his actions, and it's not long before he has completely alienated Beth. In fairness, Beth has some strange ideas herself about masochism (as do we all, ultimately, and the other way too). Neither one of these characters is very good at this. The story is not so much about BDSM but more about the treacheries of forging sexual relationships, the many places where compromise fatally undermines them. The problem of stating needs becomes an endless tiresome matter of negotiation, which ruins it. All the ways that sex comes up short, and love with it. It's not bad, but I think Gaitskill has done better elsewhere.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Don't Cry (2009)

I spent a good deal of time believing Mary Gaitskill was a better story writer than novelist, chiefly because there were two books of (very good) stories to one flawed novel that I loved in spite of its flaws—even because of some of its flaws. Veronica changed that calculation, though I'm not entirely sure it isn't flawed too in its ways. But it's such an impressive leap of imagination and memory that it's at least the equal of either collection, let alone any one story. Now Don't Cry seems to take that tilt another step in. Gaitskill is growing older and more ponderous like the rest of us—that's a big part of what made Veronica great—but it also means her crystalline prose can become tangled as it attempts to pin down endless nuance. The arduous quantum mechanics of precision writing will have its toll, and many patches in these stories feel a good bit fussed over. It's reminiscent of the arc of Henry James's progression, perhaps, which I suppose means I should give them another chance. Some I found a chore to plow through—"Folk Song," "Mirror Ball," "The Arms and Legs of the Lake." Others, such as "Today I'm Yours" and "The Little Boy," work reasonably well. "College Town, 1980" was more disappointing because it started so well. "The Agonized Face" is possessed of interesting ideas, and thus a bit arid and intellectualized. I like the last two stories best, I think, "Description" and "Don't Cry." They are linked, but in an odd way, unfolding as two very different—and very differently approached and told—episodes from the life of a creative writing instructor. In the first she has a fairly minor, offstage role. In the second she is present as a supporting player, albeit a key one, and one whose own biography intrudes on and affects, sometimes directly, the development of events. Gaitskill works best for me when she is dealing with the negative space between human cruelty, emotional distance, and the longing for connection. Almost entirely gone here are the references to sadomasochism—as lifestyle, as orientation, as underpinning philosophy—and I find that I miss them. Maybe this represents a kind of maturity for her, but I still miss them.

In case it's not at the library.

Because They Wanted To (1997)

Mary Gaitskill's second collection of stories is the first thing I read by her. Now, after circling back to it after getting to the rest of her stuff, I'm pretty sure it's the best thing she's done, with the possible exception of her novel Veronica. From the trajectory of her career I get the sense somehow that she's happiest working in the short-story form. She applies herself to it particularly well here. At least three stories—"Tiny, Smiling Daddy," "Because They Wanted To," and "The Girl on the Plane"—are just great, remarkable, searing portraits of disaffected lives in extremity, utterly without pretensions, and they leave marks. The first is largely the interior dialogue of a middle-aged man who doesn't know his daughter any better than he knows himself, stubbornly clinging to seeing her primarily only as an extension of his own identity and nothing else. It's comical but mostly painful to see him thrashing around the ruins of his life, angry and embittered and alone, with no understanding of how he has come to such a pass. The latter two are more simple—externalized scenarios that unfold with implacable inevitability, yet also in directions that are hard to guess. "The Girl on the Plane" is told first-person by a cocky and frivolous man who attempts to make a pass at a woman he meets on an airline flight. He goes about it in ways that are almost shockingly inappropriate, snarling and sneering and insulting her. And it even seems to be working at some points—it's hard to tell—but then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid—stupefyingly stupid, so much so that it entirely calls into question his veracity as a narrator in the first place. The response is swift and real. The title story is even more externalized, recounting the tale of a 16-year-old runaway from California trying to eke out a living in Vancouver, knowing virtually no one there and evidently understanding so little about making one's way in the world that one shudders for her. Even so, what happens when she takes a day job watching kids for a woman in the woman's apartment while the woman goes out job hunting is completely unexpected, unsettling, and more haunting than I can say. The depths and power of it surprise me every time, even as every time I return to it I hope for something better. It never comes and I am always surprised again.

In case it's not at the library.

Bad Behavior (1988)

Mary Gaitskill's first collection of stories remains daring and remarkable to this day, I think, assiduously working further edges of conventional propriety with dedication and nerve. It's arguable enough that these stories are sensational simply for the sake of winning attention, but I think there's more to them. They are populated and overpopulated with prostitutes, practicing sadomasochists, and fucked-up Americans of many stripes, usually urban creatures operating out of New York or various points elsewhere, such as San Francisco and Michigan. Young women turn to prostitution to make ends meet. Grown adults in marriages carry on empty affairs, or indulge mockable perversions. People in these stories keep trying to connect but are thwarted by the static noise of sex and all its confusions, most often the confusion with love. One of the best stories here, "Something Nice," tells about a john who fancies himself apart and above the exploitation in which he regularly indulges, and falls in love with a prostitute. Later, after she has left the trade and he sees her in public with a boyfriend, she pretends not to know him. He is devastatingly humiliated. Perhaps the most famous story here, "Secretary"—because it was made into a decidedly minor indie movie in the '90s—is also one of the most puzzling and least effective, relying heavily on a tendency to reduce characters and situations to ciphers that don't compute; it appears to be trying to work as some kind of representational allegory. At those times it feels like Gaitskill is attempting to have her cake and eat it too, so to speak—attempting to extract the pathos she knows well in these empty middle-class lives even as she ruthlessly, casually, and heartlessly makes fun of them And Everything They Stand For. Better when she just goes right at the poignant details and lets the stories sort themselves out, as in the long hodgepodge of the last story, "Heroes," with all the siblings of two generations coming and going and some characters that seem flatly unbelievable, until the totality of the events recounted mounts to an impressive presence, and one finds oneself half in love with a few of them, and feeling as though one knows them all very well and cares what happens to them. It's no wonder that this was taken as an auspicious first book—it is.

In case it's not at the library.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991)

Objectively speaking, Mary Gaitskill's first novel is probably the least skillful of all her books, including her first collection of stories, Bad Behavior, published three years earlier. One gets the unmistakable sense that she was a story writer by inclination who had been encouraged—even harried—by various factotums of the publishing industry to produce a novel, which conventional wisdom (and, indeed, experience) argues is more likely to bring the commercial potential. (In many ways Veronica, her other novel, operates like an extended story, eschewing the structures and developments of a novel.) But for all that, Two Girls, Fat and Thin remains a favorite of mine. I like its depictions of a life in Manhattan that revolves around eking by on temp work while working on the kind of writing style that gets you published in the "Village Voice." In carefully modulated bursts, Gaitskill works up her own version of such a style, which is a pleasure to read both as parody and, to be honest about it, probably because I tend to be notably susceptible to "Village Voice" tricks of the trade, e.g., the cunning knowingness evinced by constant cultural one-upmanship reference, the shallow embrace of outrageous gestures of fashion, and/or the contempt for sentimentality even as one celebrates art rooted in sentimentality, so on and so forth. At the same time, Gaitskill takes one of her deepest plunges here into the interiority of sadomasochistic sexuality, which becomes an entire universe in her hands, a dark, scary, alluring, sexy place where people go, consciously and otherwise, to damage themselves. Awkward and obvious elements—such as naming one of the protagonists vying for supremacy here Justine Shade, or more generally the transparent mockery of Ayn Rand and Objectivism—live side by side with scenes that are frank, brutal, and absolutely convincing. It can also be very funny, a tale of children away from home trying to act the way they imagine grown-ups do, making their mistakes and hurrying away from them, the psychological equivalent of a cat who believes it has hidden itself by tucking only its head under the couch. The flaws of everyone here are plainly obvious to anyone but those who possess them, and it operates on that level as a comedy of manners. It's altogether a rich stew of late-20th-century urban experience, a charming, black, and vastly entertaining one, and one that I still enjoy returning to frequently.

In case it's not at the library.

Veronica (2005)

Mary Gaitskill's second novel is vastly more skilled than her first, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (which I think is quite good even so), perhaps because it's more on a par with her highly skilled stories, collected in Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which are amazing. Before she is anything else, Mary Gaitskill is an agonizingly precise writer, finicky but breathtakingly inspired, plunging directly into feverish scenes of wanton desperation and madness, drugs and sex and so forth. Her language is engaging yet dazzling; one often feels as though standing in a museum room empty of people, bristling with brilliant and attractive and seductive detail. The action of the plot is irreducibly simple: a woman walks up a hill in San Francisco and remembers things. Out of that, Gaitskill has hatched a world that gleams with veracity and allure and deep wells of connotation, one it's easy to lose oneself in. The woman is named Alison Owen and her walk takes place more or less in the present day. Now facing health issues related to various hazards of aging (hepatitis, in her case, along with a disability), her memories are of then and now, where she was and how she got here, from glamour days in the late '60s and '70s and into the '80s in Paris and New York and across the globe when she worked and earned prolifically as a briefly celebrated fashion model. Alison steps into her past gracefully; it is evidently a place she visits often. Her mind goes a million directions at once, constantly. She takes these walks to help her sleep at night. The titular Veronica is an old friend of hers, one who attempted to stand slightly outside of the milieu of beautiful models and drug addicts and other parasites that she (Veronica) nevertheless found endlessly stimulating. And Veronica managed to find a safe niche for herself with a good vantage, as a freelance proofreader. But alas, those times, she (Veronica) fell in love with the wrong person, acquired HIV, and succumbed early to AIDS. So she is entirely gone during Alison's walk, died years earlier, living on as so much does here almost exclusively in Alison's brooding memory. Veronica may ultimately represent a strange doppelganger for Alison, but Gaitskill patiently whittles out the shapes of her themes, the truths and the sensory details both. The memories churn inside Alison, often about Veronica, and Gaitskill renders them, and the times in which they occur, so vividly that it is uncanny. Even with almost nothing going on, this turns out to be a real page-turner.

In case it's not at the library.