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Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 1/119 politics today's papers "No" Worries Holder: Our Bad, Stevens politics today's papers Courting Bankruptcy Return of the Insurgency politics today's papers From Détente to Taunts Government Ready To Split GM in Two press box today's papers The Water-War Myth Last Chance for GM and Chrysler? press box tv club Are Times Publishers Born Stupid? Friday Night Lights, Season 3 press box war stories Bring Back Yellow Journalism The Return of Statecraft recycled Madonna and Child, Africa Edition, Part 2 recycled The April Fools' Day Defense Kit books What Would Happen if You Couldn't recycled Stop Crying? The 25-Cent Flood Protection Device Mary Gaitskill's deeply strange new vision. By Claire Dederer Science The Problem With 3-D Monday, March 30, 2009, at 11:55 AM ET shopping Battle of the Banks Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, having Mary Gaitskill's story collection Bad Behavior (1988) on your bookshelf meant sports nut something. Gaitskill told stories about secretaries getting The Final Snore spanked, mopey young women caught in sadomasochistic affairs, disaffected prostitutes who were just trying to get enough technology The Poor Man's Mac money to go to art school. To display her book meant you were self-consciously transgressive. You might not live full-time on technology the dark side, but you'd paid a few visits there. The Worm That Ate the Web The book was, to misquote Spinal Tap, sexual but not sexy. The television stories were too scary to be read as lite porn. The book was Andy Richter Comes in From the Rain made especially unnerving by its lack of any identifiable stance. Gaitskill was writing about what was generally considered kinky the best policy sex, but she wasn't recognizably pro-sex, a fun-to-say term we The Regulatory Charade had all learned only recently. In fact, she took special care to the green lantern show the pain behind the spanking and hooking. Her people A Pressing Issue shifted in and out of insanity; they were desensitized; they were just plain sad. Gaitskill was so good at evoking this sadness that the has-been it came to seem inevitable; not just for her characters, but for her Bitter Lemons reader. No one got off the hook. the spectator Bad Behavior was followed by two books which didn't stray Should We Care What Shakespeare Did in Bed? widely: Two Girls Fat and Thin (1991), a novel with more S&M today's papers and also a spiky, funny satire of the followers of Ayn Rand, and The New, Supersized IMF then Because They Wanted To (1997), another story collection similarly themed. Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/119 Transgression comes prepackaged with its own obsolescence; I these three layers constantly interact. This interaction ends her found myself thinking of Gaitskill as somehow outdated. I was up in some pretty weird places in Don't Cry, none weirder than growing up and no longer interested in the titillating and "Mirror Ball," a story about a girl who has a one-night stand upsetting subject matter of her books. I mistook the writer for with a musician and gets her feelings hurt. Hardly an her subject, and in my mind I reduced her to some kind of just- extraordinary topic, but in Gaitskill's story, something for-thrills caricature of herself: I pictured her pierced and extraordinary happens: "He took her soul—though, being a glowering, clad in a bra and a black leather jacket, frightening secular-minded person, he didn't think of it that way." the horses just as hard as she could. The girl senses that her soul has been stolen but can't quite put Then, in 2006, Gaitskill published the novel Veronica, in which her finger on the problem. She tries framing her dilemma in the a former fashion model named Alison, now very sick with language more commonly used in fiction: "Because the girl was hepatitis C, looks back on her life and allegedly high times. also a secular person, she didn't know he'd taken her soul any Alison finds that she can't stop thinking about Veronica, an more than he did. … Rational and proud, she controlled her uncool co-worker from Alison's temping days who has died of feelings by categorizing them in terms of obsession and AIDS. The book is a relentlessly serious exploration of early projection." mortality; it is also beautifully written, filled with bizarre descants. This passage—describing a Paris runway show— In other words, the girl tries to be normal. She tries to define her demonstrates how Gaitskill marries her old raw sensibility with a experience through the accepted language of emotion. But fresh, overheated strangeness: Gaitskill is never interested in accepted language. She rejects the usual psychological readings of the self. What we call emotional Thumping music took you into the lower body, reality, Gaitskill calls categories. where the valves and pistons were working. You caught a dark whiff of shit, the sweetness Gaitskill wants to show something more terrible and, to her of cherries, and the laughter of girls. Like mind, more real that is happening to the girl, that happens maybe lightning, the contrast cut down the center of to all girls who give their souls away to boys. She writes, the earth: We all eat and shit, screw and die. "Where her soul had once held space, there was a ragged hole, But here is Beauty in a white dress. dark and deep as the pit of the earth. At the bottom of it ran boiling rivers of Male and Female bearing every ingredient for Veronica seems to have marked a new direction in Gaitskill's every man and woman, every animal and plant." writing. Her latest collection, Don't Cry, continues to use operatically strange writing to probe elusive states of mind. This writing could be called humorless and pretentious; it could Risking corniness, Gaitskill writes about big feelings, like fear also be called brave and even majestic. Gaitskill refuses to and love and subjugation—feelings that bind us to others and diminish the girl's experience. She magnifies it until it achieves that also expose our aloneness. But corniness is the last thing she the same largeness of scale that Chekhov gave to the girl in the has produced. Instead, she reframes these emotions in new ways. woods, mourning her dead baby. There's almost a defiance going on here: Gaitskill won't choose one kind of event as more In fact, she seems always to be asking us to think of a world that important than another. In adult life, we put things safely in exists beyond our usual names for, and experiences of, emotion. categories. Gaitskill doesn't, won't. In the story "Description," a writing teacher named Janice reads her class a passage from Chekhov about a young woman whose This is her project throughout the book: to remind us that baby has just died. people's experience ought not to be gainsaid. Experience ought to be explored and revealed, physically, emotionally, and Janice asked them whether they could imagine spiritually. The women in this book lament their dead fathers; go such a scene written now. The suffering girl crazy; have sex with 1,000 men, literally; work menial jobs; lose walking in the live darkness, the vast world of their spouses; have love affairs; wonder why their children have creatures all around. The girl and her suffering turned out not so great. Their stories are sometimes ordinary and a small thing in this mysterious, still-soft, and sometimes disturbing. Sometimes the women have naughty sex, beautiful world. Through this description of as in Gaitskill stories of yore. Sometimes they just walk through physical life, said Janice, mystery was bigger an airport. Gaitskill treats them as though there's no difference. than human feeling, and yet physical life bore Her pitiless seeing, her occasional grandiosity, is dispensed to up human feeling as with a compassionate them all. hand. In the title story, a small masterpiece, we again encounter the Here, Gaitskill has identified the three layers of experience she writing teacher, Janice, from the story "Description." Recently wants to explore: physical life, human feeling, mystery.