Mary Gaitskill’s new short story collection, “Don’t Cry,” is an eccentric novel that covers many things, among them Ethiopian babies, one-night stands, widows, soldiers and 43-year-old red-headed virgins. With little prologue, she is able to plumb the emotional depths of these and other idiosyncratically imagined characters, microscopically examining the bloody pulp of their thoughts and feelings — horrors, indignities, uncomfortable wants and all. Though these are certainly raw and bruise-inducing stories, at their core they are about our persistent drive as people to connect, love and know others and ourselves.
Gaitskill first emerged as a powerful literary player in 1988 when her first collection of short stories, “Bad Behavior,” was published. The collection was lauded for its daring depiction of female characters embroiled in situations involving prostitution, sado-masochism and addiction, a combination of scenarios Gaitskill has admitted to experiencing firsthand.
One of the short stories within “Bad Behavior” is “Secretary,” which was adapted into a major motion picture in 2002 starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as the submissive title character. Though it brought her an immense amount of publicity, Gaitskill was critical of the film, claiming it was whitewashed in deference to idyllic Hollywood romantic tropes.
Gaitskill published her second book, a novel titled “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” in 1991. Her third was a short story collection, “Because They Wanted To,” in 1997. The collection won Gaitskill a PEN/Faulkner award nomination and established her reputation as a formidable and deeply powerful writer. Eight years later, she published “Veronica,” a tale of two women in love, one of which is afflicted with AIDS. The novel became a National Book Award nominee. Now, after 10 years, Gaitskill proves herself again as an American fiction powerhouse with “Don’t Cry.” The stories are searing and are of a biting and unique power that precisely depict the range and spectrum of ugly desires and motivations that populate and animate our unspoken thoughts.
“Don’t Cry” starts strong with “College Town 1980,” which chronicles Dolores, an “overweight twenty-nine-year-old in stretch pants and a scarf that hides her debased head. Dolores is mentally ill and unable to have orgasms, not even by herself, sitting in a college town with nothing to do but run around the phys ed building.” These are the characters Gaitskill favors — scarred and fractured, yet in whom we can see the less admirable parts of ourselves. Gaitskill renders all of the unspoken and ungraceful cogs of Dolores’ inner thoughts (“Dolores tried to think about how one of them was ugly and the other stupid. It didn’t help”), giving us a powerfully unblinking and affecting psychological portrait of floundering self-sufficiency. Gaitskill undresses the conscious of Dolores and all of her characters with elegant syntactical precision in prose that is sharp and emotionally potent.
The effect here — and in the collection’s other stories — is an emotionally potent brand of voyeurism. Gaitskill holds our eyes open to depths where we negotiate uncomfortable truces within our everyday lives — loneliness, loss and love. In “Mirrorball,” she crafts this theme into an eerily evocative metaphor. A “dark-haired elfin girl” has a one-night stand with a musician she meets at a bar. During the exchange, he manages to take a part of “her soul.” The story charts the girl’s emotional trauma as she negotiates and digests the strangeness of the loss. In the hands of a lesser writer, going out on a metaphorical limb like this might result in disaster or camp, but Gaitskill’s cool, penetrating and precise prose instead makes for a story that is achingly poignant, simultaneously redemptive and sad.
“Everybody knows about dark and lonely places,” the musician from “Mirrorball” posits. This is a universal truth of which Gaitskill is aware. The stories in “Don’t Cry” collectively work to illuminate and explore those dark and lonely places through searing and unashamed honesty. The results — painful, messy and inconvenient — do leave scars, Gaitskill suggests, but they are also necessary and inseparable parts of ourselves that are capable of conquering pain.
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
