Too often writers treat extreme subjects simply to get our attention–gee, imagine a writer wanting attention–or to misdirect it from literary defects. But Gaitskill seems to have a vision rather than a career agenda. Her characters do their share of plain and fancy coupling, but her true subject is their essential disconnectedness and their sometimes pathetic, sometimes heroic solitude. Much of what happens between her people is suggested in a single sentence in the story “Orchid,” about a womanizer’s unhappy girlfriends: “They would look at Patrick as if calmly measuring the distance between him and them, as if they knew that his little area of private space was closed to them, but that was all right because they had their own little area they were planning to go back to once they got what they came for–although of course it often didn’t work out that way.” S&M role-playing differs from “normal” relationships like these only in that the two-way contract to get “what they came for” is more naked.
In fact, genuine tie-me-up-and-beat-me masochists aren’t overrepresented in Gaitskill’s fictional demographic, but her people often put maximum creativity into getting minimum satisfaction. (Perhaps you recognize this syndrome.) And despite her “dark” reputation, she’s alive to the comic possibilities of compulsion. In “The Dentist,” a woman drawn to “the kind of refined, convoluted fellow who likes to make a very fancy mess,” works up an obsession with her dentist. He invites her to a body-piercing exhibition (they end up at “an art film about a drug-addicted police officer who sexually abuses young girls”), makes pathologically bald excuses not to bed her (“I have to feed the dog”) and at last proclaims, “I’m bland and I have a low level of emotional vibrancy and I like it that way!”
“Because They Wanted To” is too rich to read at a sitting–too many good lines, too much precision about too many complicated emotions–yet it’s too compelling not to. These stories are longer, fuller and more habitable than the pieces in “Bad Behavior,” and Gaitskill’s prose has gotten more intense. An almost hallucinatory animation pervades her peerless descriptions of bad sex. “My kiss became an escalating blur of useless feeling … She flew by me in an electrical storm. She had discovered that I didn’t want her, but she was ignoring her discovery … I rifled my memories of her, all her different faces; none of them stayed with me.” That our heroine is just about to get slapped in the crotch with a handful of tapioca pudding that Gaitskill has deftly planted nearby (“It just felt right,” her apologetic partner explains later) doesn’t make this passage any less scary in its representation of the boundless human potential for lovelessness. But it shows that there’s more to Gaitskill than simple unrelenting heaviosity–and that she’s a writer who’s apt to pull just about anything.
PHOTO (COLOR): Plain and fancy coupling, heroic solitude: Gaitskill in her Houston apartment
A LITERARY LONE STAR
MARY GAITSKILL IS 42, HAS TWO CATS, NO kids, and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Houston. Before that, teaching gigs at Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute and Hollins College in Virginia. Before that, New York. “I don’t know where I’ll be next year,” she told NEWSWEEK’S Ray Sawhill. “I probably would not have moved here if not for the job, but I kind of like it so far. People here aren’t as frantic and meticulous about presenting an image. I did like San Francisco, but it got wearying, the cuteness.” She also writes for magazines, “mainly to pay the bills. Women’s magazines will keep you in clover–Elle, Mirabella, Vogue. I write about whatever they tell me to write about. I think they tend to like it if I write about stuff that’s seen as sexy or dark.” Right, so what about this whole “dark lady” rep of hers? “I get that even from people who like my writing. It leaves me really puzzled. My friends have gotten the humor; they thought “The Dentist’ was a hoot. I have a relative who characterizes my work as dark. This is a woman who sat and watched the Jeffrey Dahmer case every day. Every day!”
