Mary Gaitskill’s Writing

Anne reminds me of how much I admire Mary Gaitskill’s writing. Her collection of short stories, Bad Behavior, is pretty much amazing. I’m not really amazed by writing – or, let’s say: it takes a LOT to amaze me. My idol is James Joyce, so that’s probably why. You want to blow me away as a writer? You better be damn good. But Mary Gaitskill’s writing amazed me, in that book. Woah. I wasn’t as into her first novel, called Two Girls Fat and Thin – but what she displayed in that first collection is enough for me to read anything she writes.

The film Secretary was based on one of the short stories in that first collection. I’m such a Gaitskill fan that I was afraid to see the film, afraid they would water down that story – which is – ahem – pretty OUT there … but I was very very pleased to see that they didn’t. The film WENT there. Hard to believe that film actually got made, come to think of it. Very very good.

Gaitskill’s an incredible writer. I will have to pick up a copy of her latest book.

Here’s the review in The Times.

Excerpt:

Gaitskill’s work is far more humanistic than a reader given to sunnier fare might first suppose. And her palpable talent puts her among the most eloquent and perceptive contemporary fiction writers. The stories in “Bad Behavior,” her 1988 debut, are Chekhovian in their quietude, inviting us to complicate our frameworks for questions of individual and social responsibility. Is the bullied always a victim? Is love always intimate? Why does weakness make us uncomfortable – or excited? A lesser writer might have sentimentalized or valorized the “bad behavior” Gaitskill has continued to make her terrain over the past 17 years; she has instead worked to make us more aware of our own uninterrogated assumptions. Currents of empathy pool beneath the icy surface of her prose – a surface that is itself very beautiful indeed: her sentences are flinty and bright. In a curious way, Gaitskill may be among the more old-fashioned of our writers, a documentarian for a hypersexualized age in which Jenna Jameson’s memoir is a best seller and appearances matter more than ever.

True, true. Very well put. She is an old-fashioned writer.

I love this:

A book about superficiality might easily be fueled by fumes. But in Gaitskill’s hands “Veronica” is a masterly examination of the relationship between surface and self, culture and fashion, time and memory. Gaitskill has long been interested in what she once called the “great ferocity latent in women,” and the best passages in “Veronica” detail the young Alison on the prowl, at once hunter and prey as a young runaway in San Francisco. Gaitskill is enormously gifted at depicting youthful impatience and the dangerous, febrile sensuality that accompanies it, and throughout the book are passages of plainly spectacular beauty.

It’s almost like her prose VIBRATES. It’s that good.

Lastly, from the review:

Even so, Gaitskill is reaching further into her preoccupations than ever before, and the novel is full of very real pleasures. Her prose has a perfumed clarity. She tacks against the upright dichotomies of our historical moment – dichotomies that shape how we think and who we are but are often more contingent than we know. In “Veronica,” as ever, Gaitskill’s brand of brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace, is unlike anyone else’s. And it constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around.

Yup. She’s damn good. She’s also one of those writers that I could recognize – or, I mean – I could recognize her prose, even if I didn’t know the author. She’s distinctive. But it’s not a gimmick, or a trick. It’s her style, it’s her natural way of expressing herself. It’s unmistakable.