Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

If you have read any of my reviews in the past, you probably realize that once I find an author I like, I tend to read up all of their work pretty quickly, or at least read them until I think I have learned from them what I can. This has definitely been the case with the intriguing and troubling author, Mary Gaitskill. I have talked to you before about her two collections of short stories and her recent novel, Veronica; today I am going to talk about her other novel published in 1991, Two Girls, Fat and Thin.

Some of my reader friends who have taken my advice and read Gaitskill have returned the books to me, often only partially read, asking me again just why I have thought her important enough as an author to recommend her to others. Yes, they have agreed, she is a wonderful user of the language; yes, she does come up with metaphors that are striking, surprising, sometimes beautiful (though in a distorted or twisted way). Yes, she certainly describes well what life must be like for some young, beautiful girls/women who get sucked up into the world of modeling and/or the sex trade. Yes, she provides a window into the lives of young street kids in New York City and San Francisco. But her characters are often so sad, the lives she describes often so bleak and desperate, and with so little suggestion about how things can be made better. Defending her to one such skeptical friend, I pointed out that she tells us so much about how sado-masochism plays into the sexual lives of some people and how our knee-jerk rejections of all forms of S&M are blind and misinformed. Perhaps, he agreed, but she seems to go on and on with her descriptions, and one can only take so much of such stuff or learn from it. What is her point in the continuing descriptions? How is the information she gives us helpful or hopeful?

Certainly, as I read Two Girls, Fat and Thin the above questions returned to me over and over. I almost put the book down early, but could not quite do it. USA Today calls the book “darkly, erotically compelling,” and another commentator talks of Gaitskill’s “brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace.” I can’t say I see the book as erotic, but I certainly see the acid, and I certainly see the grace. She is a stunningly honest writer, holding nothing back—not bad language, not rather horrific scenes.

As in Veronica, this is book about a relationship between two women, one who is slim and beautiful, the other fat and intentionally unstylish. The women, at least on the surface, seem to be about as unlike as any two people can be, and yet there is a kind of alliance that forms between them. Both have been sexually molested as children, and their sexuality has formed out of that molestation. The immediate cause of their meeting is a shared interest in a controversial intellectual, Anna Granite, who is quite obviously based on the equally controversial Ayn Rand. Dorothy, the fat and unlovely woman who finds a kind of salvation in the works of Granite, and in fact comes to work for Granite as a kind of secretary, answers an ad placed by the younger, beautiful Justine Shade who is a writer wanting to write an article about the once famous but now almost forgotten Anna Granite.

Once we are introduced to the two main characters, the novel proceeds in alternating chapters to tell us about the childhoods of the two lead characters, and only at novel’s end are their separate stories brought together, again via their mutual interests in Anna Granite.

The first time I wrote this piece, I felt obliged at this point to go off on a critique of Ayn Rand and the naïve and pernicious form of selfishness that she endorsed. But this novel is not really about Rand; it is about the odd bond that forms between these two women as a result of their shared interest in the Rand-like character. What Gaitskill seems to realize and wants to point out, and what I had never noticed in my earlier readings of Rand, is that for the fifties and sixties when Rand’s work became famous, there is a rather strong feminist current in her work. Rand urged women not to see themselves simply as extensions of their men or of their families. Her female characters are at least as strong and authentic as her male characters; it is not surprising that women who had been abused by their fathers, their husbands and boyfriends found a message of hope and strength in Rand. Women are not simply the helpmates of men, are not simply to be used by men; it is not a virtue for women to submerge themselves in the needs of others. Dorothy comes to see that a healthy sense of self-interest is not the same as selfishness, and that it may be a requirement for sanity, for salvation.

Indeed, when towards the end of the book, Dorothy rushes to Justine’s apartment to confront her about Justine’s rather scathing article on Anna Granite, she finds that the beautiful Justine is in many ways a victim of her beauty, of her sexual appeal for men, and that in truth she has no more real and caring friends than the dumpy Dorothy. In fact, Dorothy rescues Justine from an S&M scene that has gotten out of hand, and quite literally throws the man, naked and protesting, out of Justine’s apartment.

Then I realized she was crying. Tears dropped from her chin onto her folded hands, and she trembled small and hard. She sat erect and contained, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her robe and gulping discreetly. I didn’t comfort her because her body did not invite it. But I sat with my heart opened to her, feeling her heart mournfully opening to me, sending me the messages that can be received only by another heart, that which the intellect can never apprehend.

And so there is almost what you would call a happy ending to this novel, a kind of resolution in which these two quite different women open out to one another, see one another for the first time, see how each is in many ways simply acting out a life fashioned by her past. There is at least the hint of a budding friendship, a suggestion of a brighter and less lonely future for both.

I still can’t be sure what I’m getting from Gaitskill, and yet I know if she publishes again, I will read what she has written. Her voice is very much here and now, and when her stuff is sad, it is a sadness of the here and now world we live in. I am glad to have heard her voice. I cannot shake the sense that I am learning something important from her.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

There was a time when I read disturbing authors only if I knew beforehand that I would learn something important from being disturbed. Mary Gaitskill may well have failed to measure up to my strict criterion, but it is I who would have been the loser for not reading her. I have talked to you before about two of her collections of short stories, each a photograph or still life that suggested a whole world outside the margins of the frozen scene. Today I want to talk to you about her latest novel, Veronica, which is, I think, the fleshing out of the world glimpsed in the short stories.

The brutal truth is that beauty can be a curse for a woman in a way that it rarely or never is for a man. Alison is only seventeen when she is discovered by a guy who runs a sleazy modeling agency in San Francisco. A runaway at fifteen who returns to her family only long enough to run away again at sixteen, Alison is as street smart and wild as any of the young girls depicted in Gaitskill’s earlier short stories, so although Gregory Carlson does lure her to his studio to take pictures and then to sample the flesh of this young beauty he spied selling flowers on the street, she at least half knows that will be the outcome before she accepts his invitation. She watches what happens to her with the eye of a painter or researcher. Perhaps had he been only a trickster or Allison less beautiful, that would have been the whole of the story, but he does send off the pictures he takes, and Allison is contacted by a modeling agency in New York. Returning home again only long enough to get the reluctant blessing of her parents, Allison soon finds herself in Paris living around a group of young, beautiful girls who are alternately coddled and abused, kept in fancy apartments where there are literally bowls of cocaine and pantries full of fancy party foods.

It is this period of a few months that provides the backdrop for the rest of the story. Alison becomes famous in a minor way quite quickly, but when she publicly shames the head of the modeling agency who owns the apartment she lives in and whose mistress she has become, she is quite literally dumped on the streets of Paris, blacklisted and more-or-less broke.

I have been talking as if Gaitskill tells her story in a chronological fashion, but in fact, she is a master of time-change, of moving from present to past not simply chapter by chapter, but often from one sentence to the next. Indeed, the bulk of the story centers around a period of time when Alison is a proofreader in New York, and even that story is told from a present that occurs many years later in which Allison, now living again in San Francisco and a lifetime removed from the nubile youth required for her earlier years of modeling, is very ill with hepatitis, her past swimming before her in a fevered haze of memory.

Having filled you in on this much of the story, I still have not even mentioned the title character, Veronica. Unlike the often pathetically thin, underfed girls Alison has known in the world of models, Veronica is an overweight, middle-aged woman whose sense of style is outlandish and whose cynicism is finally polished and directed shotgun style at almost all who fall under her gaze. I have no idea how Gaitskill landed on this unlikely duo as the lynchpins for her story, and yet the attachment, even love, that develops over time between these two is quite extraordinary, and for a novel as tough and unsentimental as this one, almost tender. Their relationship blossoms in the troubled New York of the 80s when AIDS is new and when New York comes to be known as the city of death. The chain-smoking, tough-talking Veronica is a loner and fellow worker who proofreads “like a cop with a nightstick; ” she dates a bisexual man who is away with his young boys much more often than he is with Veronica, and the stories she tells of their strange dates in Central Park are bleak and alarming.

Although the reader is introduced to Veronica early in the novel, it is only in the helter-skelter jumping from past to present, Paris to New York to San Francisco that the story of their relationship slowly unfolds. Indeed, Veronica is already long dead from AIDS and Alison super sick with hepatitis C when Gaitskill now and then returns the reader to the present.

I have perhaps told you more of the story already than I need to, and you may well be wondering why, given the gloomy list of events, one would want to read such a novel. The answer is in the beauty of the writing and the emotional depth achieved by the author. Gaitskill knows these characters, and she knows them with the certainty of having lived these lives rather than merely viewing them. Her metaphors are wild, sometimes even twisted and alarming, and yet seem utterly appropriate the moment one reads them. At least this reader wonders why he has not seen the world in just such metaphors as soon as they leap off the page. Gaitskill says of one of her characters that “His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact,” and I am tempted to use just that language to describe her writing. There is such a fierce beauty in the ugly scenes she depicts, in the deep, inner agony she describes.

I know that I cannot do justice to the writing by quoting a line or two, and there is certainly no way I can capture Gaitskill’s incredible ease in moving from time to time, place to place, in slowly allowing this story to take form by weaving present to past, naïve childhood to stormy young adulthood to fevered present. But let me leave you with a longish passage describing a bus-ride Alison is taking in San Francisco, nearly delirious from the fever engendered by hepatitis C, and yet still observing the details of events around her.

The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery. As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whining sound, like we’re streaking through space. Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them. Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around. More distant green, the side of a building. The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point. It sags down with a gassy sigh. Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor. Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus. The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on. The crabbed door suctions open. Teenagers stomp up through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words. ‘Cuz like—whatcho look—you was just a—ain’t lookin’ at you!’ The old lady does not look. But I can feel her taking them in. Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain. The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap. Private snack suspended for public feast of youth. She would never be so close to them except on the bus. Neither would I. For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.

If you read this book, I promise you will see and hear and smell the world Gaitskill is describing for you, and you will come away somehow with a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of these strange beings that we are.

Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill

I suppose that it is common among habitual readers to fear that they may have exhausted the supply of good books, or, at least, that they are unlikely to find new, exciting authors with anything like the regularity of the past. That fear has flickered in me so often, only to be erased in a day or two by the discovery of yet another wonderful word-weaver. My discovery of the day actually had her first volume published in 1988, but because the well of wonderful writers is, in fact, so deep, it doesn’t surprise me at all that I only now discovered her. She also has helped to chip away at my not well reasoned prejudice against and avoidance of short stories. The author’s name is Mary Gaitskill, and today I want to talk about her collection of short stories published in 1997, entitled Because they wanted to; I am now half way into her initial collection, Bad Behavior, and find it to be equally exciting and disturbing. Everything I say below about the ’97 collection I would say as well of the earlier ’88 collection.

It does not surprise me at all to read descriptions on the jacket covers of her works that include words like ‘ferocious’, ‘terrifying’, ‘thrilling’, ‘breathtaking’, ‘razor-sharp’, ‘harrowing’, ‘caustic’. Indeed, her writing is all of these things. She is brutally honest in her description of relationships; her minute descriptions of sexual acts and of the mental monologues that accompany the action are shocking even to a reader not easily shocked. But if her writing is shocking, it is also beautiful and utterly convincing. As I have said many times, I am a reader who is content to be a reader; even reading the best writing seldom evokes in me the desire to write, except when I read writers who are writing about reading and readers. But Gaitskill is the exception; were I to write, I would aspire to write with the bare, sometimes almost painfully honest style that she seems to achieve effortlessly. I lack both the skill and the courage to write as she does. Her metaphors are so unexpected that they seem to jump from the page; they often seem contradictory, and yet as soon as they have been absorbed strike at least this reader as brilliant—so accurate that it seems surprising that they have not been used before.

Each of her stories is a little vignette that stands alone, and yet after reading just a few of them, it becomes quite obvious that the author is describing lived experiences. Remarkably, Gaitskill seems equally able to write with either a male or a female voice, but no one who reads a half dozen or so of the stories will doubt that the mind behind the stories is that of a woman—and one who has witnessed many of the things related in the stories. She describes both heterosexual and homosexual relationships; she understands the world of sadomasochism, and describes it in ways that help at least this reader come to some partial understanding of it, and to at least temper some of my knee-jerk rejection and revulsion of those ways of relating. Her descriptions are neither pretty nor sentimental, but the very honesty and straight-forwardness of the writing allows the reader to see the characters with what Iris Murdoch would call love and justice—to be released at least for the moment from the obfuscating veil of ones own cares and concerns and to thus to see more clearly the world being described.

Quoting a few lines from what are already sparse, understated stories cannot do justice to Gaitskill’s writing, but let me at least try to give you the flavor of her stories. One of the stories, “Orchid,” is about a chance meeting of a woman, Margot, with a man, Patrick, whom she has not seen for sixteen years, but the meeting brings back a flood of memories for Margot, and the reader gets to eavesdrop on those memories. Margot had been a non-romantic roommate of Patrick in college, along with Patrick’s sister and another student majoring in mathematics. The sister, Dolores, is eating and at the same time gluing false fingernails onto her fingers and painting them with red polish.

Donald, the math major, watched her with bemusement and, Margot thought, perverse, furtive attraction enlivened by a little hot streak of disgust. Patrick did not watch her, but Margot felt his attention sometimes touch his sister, quickly, like a traveling drop of light, as if he were checking to be sure she was still there. He sat at the table in a torpid slouch, but his hazel eyes were live and expectant. He held his limbs, especially his hands, in peculiar twists that made Margot imagine his inner muscles in secret shapes of furious discord, but his posture was light, lax, and happy. She knew that his mother sometimes sent him bottles of Valium or Xanax, because she had once been present when one of his would-be girlfriends intercepted a care package and dumped the contents in the toilet. But she didn’t think his languor was drug induced. It seemed more the product of an unusual distribution of self, as if, by some crafty manipulation of internal circuitry, he’d concentrated himself in certain key psychic posts and abandoned the vast regions he didn’t want to be in. These empty spaces had an almost electrical allure, more highly charged than his distinct presence in the areas he occupied. Men didn’t like him very much, but whenever the phone rang, it was almost always a girl for Patrick.

Margot, usually drawn both sexually and romantically to women, cannot understand her own fascination with Patrick, both in their past as roommates, and now again after their chance meeting in New York. A steady stream of attractive women has flowed into and out of Patrick’s life, with him seeming to have very little to do with either their entrances or exits. When she asks why he bothers to be with them at all, given his flatness, his apparent lack of real interest, he responds that he is with them because they choose him, because he can’t think of a good reason to say ‘No’. Her inner confusion is compounded by the fact that the few times Patrick has made sexual moves towards her, she has sensed both his lack of real interest and her own. The story plays out with the attraction-repulsion recurring again and again, and then like most of her stories, simply ends without resolution, and yet in the process one seems to discover a lot about why so many relationships fail, and perhaps a bit about what might make some go right.

Another of the stories, “The Dentist,” begins with a botched and painful tooth-extraction by a kind but seemingly inept dentist. The female patient, Doreen, has to return to the dentist for further treatment of the resultant dry socket, and finds herself increasingly drawn to him romantically, perhaps sexually. “She remembered the dentist at his office with his hands in her mouth. She was aroused, and the ridiculousness of her arousal embarrassed her.” What follows is a series of meetings between the two in which Doreen, without being able to understand her own feelings, attempts to seduce the ever-kind and seemingly interested dentist who backs clumsily away from each of her advances. And his very rejections seem to incite Doreen further; “she couldn’t believe that the dentist’s almost morbidly bland public self had nothing to do with the increasingly alarming image she had of him. She felt she was sensing some secret part of him, something that was hurting him as well as her.” She begins to regard his patients, at least the female patients, as victims, and yet she also feels that she wants to be victimized by him. She wants him to hurt her in ways that she is convinced he wants to hurt her, if only he could step away from the blandness, unleash the repressed desires. But is this really about him, or simply revealing something about her? Again, this is an odd, even troubling story, but one that seems so full of meaning.

I may have said more to discourage you from picking up this volume than I have to encourage you, but believe me when I say that Gaitskill is a stunning writer. I can hardly wait to get my hands on her new novel, Veronica, and to be shocked and informed by her once again.