In one of Mary Gaitskill’s best short stories, The Agonized Face, a female journalist watches a “feminist author” read at a literary festival. The author begins by complaining about her biographical note in the festival brochure, which, she feels, has played up her past experiences with prostitution and psychiatric wards to make her seem like “a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff”. But just after she has persuaded the audience of the unfairness of such a portrayal, the author reads a funny story aloud from her book, which leaves the journalist unimpressed. The story – about an encounter between a man and an older woman – is flimsy and provocative, where the complaint had been tender and serious. “She sprouted three heads,” the journalist writes, “and asked that we accept them all!” The feminist had evaded something important, according to the journalist, by changing gears so abruptly: “the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene.”
Gaitskill’s characters are often unjustly perceived as kooky people doing unimaginable stuff, but her stories are neither silly nor obscene. In Secretary – later made into a treacly film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader – you can never quite tell how Debby feels about being abused and spanked by her male boss. Unlike in the movie, there is no blossoming relationship between boss and secretary, but might Debby be looking for dignity in the routine humiliation? In Oppositions, a new collection of Gaitskill’s essays, she asserts that the tragedy of the story is not so much that Debby is a victim, but that a “hunger for contact underlies her perversity and to some extent drives it”. It is a wordless yearning that contemporary feminist discourse now and again skips over in its quest to invert the male gaze and normalise female desire. And yet, as the journalist in The Agonized Face suggests, “sometimes you wish it could be that easy”.
Gaitskill skips over nothing on the page. Her sentences are leavened by a novelist’s spirited discontent with mere facts, a distrust of transparent surfaces. Recounting an incident when she was sexually assaulted at 16, she wonders why she had described it for a while as “rape”. She’d lied “not for revenge but in service of… the metaphorical truth – although what that truth was is not at all clear to me”. In a piece on Lolita, where she is withering about the “haters” who conflate art and life, Gaitskill is moved by Nabokov’s bizarre claim that he was inspired by a newspaper article about a chimpanzee in a zoo that drew with charcoal the bars of its cage. “For those of us for whom metaphors are a natural way of seeing,” Gaitskill writes, “it makes instant, terrible sense.”
The remaining essays – on music, films, the Bible, American sex scandals – together make up a shadow autobiography. We learn, from a piece on the Book of Revelation, that Gaitskill ran away from home in her teens, and that at 21 she was briefly a born-again Christian. A trip to Russia becomes an occasion to recall the time she worked at a strip joint in Canada.
Listening to Talking Heads, she realises how their music was always playing somewhere in the background, and in her head, when she was starting to write in her 20s. A song by B-Movie conjures up memories of a thwarted romance from the 80s. About music, Gaitskill declares at one point that “she is not a fan by nature”, but her longueurs on bands and songs have a certain underhand charm. Fans of her fiction will relish the impossibly cool image of a younger Gaitskill typing out her early stories with the headphones on every morning.
With Gaitskill, you scarcely get or sometimes even expect popular opinions, regardless of whether she is riffing on Chekhov or the Clintons. She is seldom persuaded by groupthink, be it the “psychological uniformity of experience” that she decries in both “rape-crisis” American feminists and their critics in the mid-90s, or years later, the “hive-mind” that she feels is at work in the bestselling novel Gone Girl: “There is nothing here but ‘that guy’ or ‘that girl’, and that means nothing, period.” She defends John Updike’s right to be narcissistic, Norman Mailer’s impulse to be a “kook”.
I can’t imagine another writer today, in this age of lucrative film rights and airtight confidentiality agreements, even mildly disapproving of a movie based on one of their stories. Gaitskill is gloriously trenchant, but never gimmicky, in these unsparing essays.
Oppositions: Selected Essays by Mary Gaitskill is published by Profile (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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