Don't Cry: Stories [Hardcover]

Gaitskill's first two books, a collection of short stories, Bad Behavior, and a novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, were exceptional. Our son assigned her second novel, Veronica, a National Book Award nominee, as required reading in a philosophy course and he's got good taste in such matters. Her fourth book, Because They Wanted To, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In short, Gaitskill is for real and a very good writer.

Don't Cry is her first collection of short stories in ten years. The best stories are quite good but overall the collection is uneven. "College Town 1980" is exceptional. It is difficult to describe except to say that Gaitskill paints a young woman's failed relations and personal problems but reveals the steely resolve that underlies her unhappiness. "Folk Song" is an extended reflection on two extreme incidents: the television interview of a convicted serial murderer and the announcement by a woman that she is going to break the world record for consecutive sex acts by having sex with a thousand men in a row. "Today I'm Yours" describes the obsession of a married woman with an on again off again lesbian lover. In "Don't Cry," a widow (her husband died of Alzheimer's) accompanies a friend to Somalia to adopt a child and mourns an act of infidelity. Equally striking but somehow artificial -it reads at moments like a creative writing workshop exercise--is "The Agonized Face": a woman attends a literary festival as a stringer for a little magazine and observes the writers on display there. From there on, the quality drops. "The Arms and Legs of the Lake," which intertwines the inner thoughts of three men riding on a train, two of them veterans of the Iraq war and the third a veteran of WWII, is the least successful story in the collection. In "Mirror Ball," a local rock icon has a one-night stand with a young girl and he steals her soul, which flutters around his apartment disturbing him in his self-absorption: the conceit isn't completely successful and some of the prose passages are dreadful, but Gaitskill is one of those rare writers whose stories grab you even when they fail.

There are commonalities in Gaitskill's fiction. 1. She's more at ease describing women than men. The men in "The Arms and Legs of the Lake," the weakest story in the book, don't seem authentic where her women almost always seem real -extreme, but real. 2. She often writes about sex in its polymorphous forms. Sometimes her descriptions of sex acts work. Other times, they embarrass -not because she's describing sex but because she overwrites. 3. All of her characters come from damaged backgrounds. They abuse themselves to continue their abasement. 4. When Gaitskill is on a roll, she writes wonderful description but the description is just as often overwritten --in "Mirror Ball," for instance. But in concreteness and detail and the heat they generate, her descriptive passages usually evoke the strong, even excessive emotions she wants to share with the reader.

Her protagonists consider themselves grotesque, but they're grotesque in the ways that vulnerable human beings often are grotesque: seeing themselves as unattractive, flawed, separated not just from the idealized norms they strive to embrace but from emotional contact with the people around them. Her characters are isolates. And their isolation pains them. In "College Town 1980," the first and the best story in the collection, the protagonist's emotions are portrayed thus: "She felt like the kind of retarded person who`s smart enough to know she's retarded." In "Mirror Ball," a needy, unfulfilled young woman is described by the semi-rock star who uses her and drops her as "a sack of things without a sack."

In discussing this book on the phone with my son. I praised Gaitskill's authorial vision. She cuts through platitude and makes us see people differently than the faces they craft for public consumption. He pointed out that Gaitskill's protagonists have much in common with the protagonists of Poe's grotesque fictions: they know they're damaged but don't know how to fix it; their loss is expressed in hyper-charged prose that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't but is always worth taking seriously.

I had this thought. In many ways, Gaitskill is Raymond Carver's mirror image. Where his prose is minimalist, hers is maximalist. His characters retreat into inarticulateness; her characters use more complicated coping mechanisms. But they write about the same experience of inadequacy, isolation, loss, bereavement.

Sure, most folks know about Mary Gaitskill for the movie version of Secretary (Secretary), loosely taken from a short story in her collection Bad Behavior (Bad Behavior), but her best works, in my opinion are her novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin (Two Girls Fat and Thin) and Veronica (Veronica). Those are, respectively, on S&M and Ayn Rand, and on AIDS and the release from a gray world.

Here we have the new collection of short stories: College Town 1980, Folk Song, A Dream of Men, The Agonized Face, Mirror Ball, Today I'm Yours, The Little Boy, The Arms and Legs of the Lake, Description, and Don't Cry.

The ones that stood out for me included "College Town 1980" where the college town is Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the people there look to find meaning where they can. (And decide that Ann Landers is correct.) Also, the title story, in which a recent widow joins her friend who is trying to adopt a child in Ethiopia and is nearly overwhelmed by her guilt from infidelity. Many of the characters find themselves in bleak emotional waters, adrift, and find the oddest sorts of floats to support themselves, and perhaps even bring job.

On the other hand, the contrived Iraq War tale in "The Arms and Legs of the Lakes" brings the writing seminar sort of mix of humanity onto a train. Three veterans, an antiwar activist, the uncle of a soldier, and newlyweds enroute to, wait for it, Niagara Falls.

Gaitskill is usually better than that, and most of the stories are quite good. If you've tried her previous work and enjoyed it, you know you'll buy this. If not, perhaps a used copy of Bad Behavior or Because They Wanted To (Because They Wanted to: Stories) would be a better introduction. Either of those I would rank about 4 1/2 stars. Some off moments, but nothing as silly as "Arms and Legs and Cliches."

I read somewhere that this was a book of stories about disaffected people. It's true, it is. The people in this book have problems and sometimes you want to scream at them, sometimes you want to smash yourself upside the head, sometimes you want to weep. These are real people and they affect you to the bone, to the soul.

And the stream of words that come out of Mary Gaitskill's imagination onto the printed page is literature at its very best, literature that explores the darker side of human relationships, that side where we don't want to go. It's not us she's writing about. But it is. We know it, we just can't admit it.

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