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Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories -- her first in more than ten years. In ''College Town l980,'' young people adrift in Ann Arbor, Michigan, debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale ''Mirrorball,'' a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; and in ''The Little Boy,'' a woman haunted by the death of her husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child. Each story delivers the powerful, original language and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body -- or of the intelligent body with the craving mind-- that has come to be seen as stunningly emblematic of Gaitskill's fiction.
- Published on: 2015-12-31
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.60" h x .60" w x 5.30" l, .20 pounds
- Running time: 27000 seconds
- Binding: MP3 CD
- 1 pages
From Booklist
National Book Award finalist Gaitskill does not write stories for the faint of heart, but�it's not the occasional violence or difficult situation that makes the reader uneasy; rather, it is the complete lack of joy in her characters’ lives. From former college students wasting time in Ann Arbor, to hipsters on one-night stands, to would-be mothers trying to adopt in Ethiopia, one character after another struggles and falls and fails to find any relief. Read individually, the stories gathered here can be enjoyed for their believable characters and dialogue, sparse descriptions, and tight craftsmanship, but as a collection, they leave the reader desperate for a glimmer of hope. Still, readers who were moved by Gaitskill’s powerful, emotionally scouring novel Veronica (2005) will be eager to take another journey down some very dark passageways. --Marta Segal Block
About the Author
Mary Gaitskill is an author whose debut novel, Veronica, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and Esquire. Her short story ''Secretary'' was the basis for the film of the same name starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
“Don't Cry”
Our first day in Addis Ababa we woke up to wedding music playing outside the hotel. We had traveled for 20 hours and we were deeply asleep. The music entered my sleep in the form of moving lights, like fireflies or animate laughter, in a pattern, but a loose and playful one. I was dreaming that I was with Thomas. In the dream, he was very young, and we were chasing a light that had come free of the others, running down a winding path with darkness all around.
When I woke at first I did not know where I was. The music seemed more real than the dingy room; its sound saturated me with happiness and pain. Then I saw Katya and remembered where we were and why. She was already up and standing at the window lifting a shade to peer out—the sun made a warm place on her skin and I felt affection for her known form in this unknown place. She turned and said, “Janice, there's weddings going on outside—plural!”
We went outside. All around our hotel were gardens, and in the gardens were crowds of people dressed in the bright colors of undiluted joy. Brides and grooms were wearing white satin, and the streets were lined with white limousines decked with flowers, and together with so much color, the white also seemed colorful. Little girls in red-and-white crinoline ran past, followed by a laughing woman. Everyone was laughing or smiling, and because I could not tell where the music came from, I had the sensation that it was coming directly from these smiling, laughing people. Katya turned to me and said, “Are we in heaven?”
I replied, “I don't know,” and for a second I meant it.
My husband Thomas had died six months before the trip to Addis Ababa. The music that woke me that first day touched my grief even before I knew it was wedding music. Even in my sleep I could hear love in it; even in my sleep, I could hear loss. I stepped out of the hotel in a state of grief, but when I saw the brides and grooms in their happiness, wonder slowly spread through my grief. It was like seeing my past and a future that was no longer mine but that I was part of anyway.
In the dirty hotel restaurant we had dry brick-like croissants and lots of good fruit—papaya, mangoes, bananas, oranges, and pineapple. The coffee was burnt, so we decided to go to the espresso place we'd been told was just a few blocks away. We never found the place, although we walked a long time. At first, we walked on a crowded street made of pavement, with department stores, an Internet caf�, and a grocery with a big Magic Marker drawing (green and red) of fruit and vegetables in the window. Starving wandered freely. The pavement abruptly fell off and gave way to rocks. We saw another wedding party, in a Mercedes decked with rich-colored flowers, moving through a herd of donkeys, the herders lagging behind, talking on their cells. Beggars swarmed around us, shouting and showing us their deformed limbs, their blind eyes. We forgot our espresso. The rocky street gave way to dirt with pools of muddy water. Houses, patched together with tin, plastic, canvas and wood, bulged out, sagged in, lurched and leaned this way, then that. Beggars swarmed us, chanting. Wedding guests in gold pants and silky shirts pushed their broken car through slowly parting pedestrians. A little boy marched along blowing a horn; he was followed by a smaller boy, who was shouting and rhythmically shaking a clutch of bells on a strap. The smell of fresh shit rose up suddenly and mixed with the odors of sweat and cooked meat. An old woman seated in the roots of a giant tree sold bundled sticks and dresses mounted on smiling white mannequins. Trees made soft, blunt, deep green shapes with their boughs. Katya turned to me, her face dazed. “We'd better go back,” she said. “We're getting lost.”
Katya was in Ethiopia to adopt a baby; I was there to help her. Katya asked me to go with her because I am one of her oldest friends, going back to our waitressing days in Manhattan. She is a narrow little woman with a broad, bossy air: ugly-beautiful, full lower lip a bit too pendulous, hips and breasts small but highly charged, black hair big, curly, and shining with secreted oil. The restaurant we worked in was run by Mafia thugs, and they would sometimes come in before the shift to do coke with us. The head thug really liked Katya; he would confide in her and ask her advice and she would console him and boss him around.
In those days I was putting myself through a writing program; she was having experiences. I got married and turned into an English professor who publishes stories in quarterly magazines. She started various businesses, which she either failed at or got bored with and sold. She had family money to begin with, and in spite of the failures along the way, she has actually amassed some money of her own. She now runs a boutique in D.C., which is where she lives. She has made some Ethiopian friends, one of whom, a woman named Meselu, runs a “big woman's” store across the street from Katya's business.
Katya had been thinking of adoption for some time; she didn't want to go through an agency in America because it pissed her off that while agencies give the birth mother full disclosure regarding the adoptive parent, there is no reciprocity. She didn't want to go through a foreign agency because most of them require a two-year wait, and she felt that, at forty-nine, she was already too old. She learned through someone on the Internet—a woman in California who'd already adopted an Ethiopian child—that independent adoptions there were relatively easy. It helped, of course, that Meselu could hook her up with people in Addis Ababa, including a driver named Yonas, who specialized in clients there to adopt.
When Katya asked me if I would go to Africa with her, I said yes, because Thomas had died four months earlier and I had still not gone back to teaching. In the emptiness of my life, it didn't seem to matter what I did; between doing nothing and doing something, it seemed better to do something. Thomas and I had never had children, and, maybe without thinking about it, I wanted to help my friend give a child safe passage. Katya had never been lucky with men and I knew she had always envied my marriage; perhaps I was hoping to balance my loss with something good for her. In any case, before I left I took Thomas' wedding ring from the altar I had made in our bedroom, took my own ring from my finger, and put them both on a gold chain around my neck.
When Yonas came to pick us up at the hotel, he told us that every Saturday in May people in Addis Ababa come out to get married, and that our hotel was an especially popular spot because of the gardens. Yonas was a young man with a beautiful face and a profound feeling of age about him. When we told him how heavenly the weddings had seemed to us, he gravely bobbed his head and made the quick, sharp inhalation that we were beginning to understand as 'yes.' He held the door of his rattling Soviet car for us and said something I couldn't understand. We got in, sank into the broken, reeking cushions, down almost to the floor.
We couldn't go to the orphanage on a Saturday, so Yonas took us up into the mountains, a trip I remember in the way I remember my dream that morning. I remember getting out of the car to stand at the top of a steep street, with big, broken stones on each side of us, and looking down at a jumble of shanties and tiny houses careering up and down a hill. Further out of the city we saw houses made of mud and gray thatch that appeared soft as hair from a distance; there was one house surrounded by a beautiful fence made of light, slender branches of all shapes and sizes linked in a winding, nearly musical pattern, varied by the curves of certain branches that suddenly and softly digressed before returning to the music of the pattern. Big flowers grew through the branches in random places, spilling their pink petals. There was a woman in the yard with a bright red scarf on her head. The sky was full of soft, swollen clouds.
That night we had dinner with Meselu's relatives. We were taken to the house by Meselu's uncle who spoke a little English; we brought huge bundles of clothes, batteries, and toiletries that Meselu had sent. The house was behind a high stone wall with an archway bowered with thick-growing plants.
The head of the family was a matriarch named Zeyneb, who served us a spread with dozens of little meat dishes—goat, beef and lamb in a variety of sauces with a grain called teff. Zeyneb sat at the head of the table in a crimson dress and passed the dishes in a formal manner. Most of her family was there—one of her two daughters, three of her four sons, and six grandchildren. The uncle translated as well as his skill would allow. We couldn't understand a lot of it; we heard something about the election and the government. Zeyneb said something about adoption and things being different than they had been. The grandchildren talked loudly and happily among themselves, listening sideways to the translations of our speech. Zeyneb asked how many children I had. When I said none, one of the little girls looked at me piercingly.
That night we went to bed early—we had to. The power was out and it got too dark to read by 8:30. We lay in the dark and talked for a long time. We talked about the jumbled streets, Zeyneb, the mountains, and the fence—which, we agreed, would cost thousands of dollars in the States. It was almost cold, and so we slept with the windows shut; the muffled street sound had a lulling effect. Katya said she was too excited to sleep, but she drifted off quickly; it was I who stirred all night, unable to sleep or to stay fully awake. The wedding music from the morning crowded my mind, the bright colors and smiles, the running girls, the laughing woman. Cars mingled with donkeys; a little boy blew a horn. Beggars came bursting out of the wedding crowd, shouting. One of them was a boy I had seen that morning, and tried not to notice, a boy with a gouged-out eye socket. We emptied our purses—I gave the gouged boy handfuls of coins—but it was not enough.
I touched the wedding rings around my neck; Thomas appeared to me and sat on the bed. I stretched out my hand to him; the street crowd vanished. I remembered Thomas inside me. Once I said “I want you inside me all the time,” and he answered “I will be.” Children peered around a dark corner—first they were Zeyneb's grandchildren, then they were unborn children waiting for Thomas and me to conceive them. Among them was the boy with the gouged eye, not begging but waiting to be born. “I want you now,” I whispered. Thomas replied, “I am here,” but faintly. Chanting sounded. It was haunting, stern, implacable as a machine made of powerful feelings cut away from their source. Rules, I thought. Punishment: it's coming. Chanting filled the suffocating room. “Shut up!” I hissed, “Just shut the fuck up!”
Katya stirred and murmured “What?”
“This noise, what is it?”
“Zeyneb said it's from the churches. Go back to sleep, it's going to go on all day.”
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
One of our great short story writers with a new collection, mostly good but one real clunker
By Michael A. Duvernois
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."
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating but uneven
By margot
Mary Gaitskill's misfortune is to be the only Mary Gaitskill working the street. I mean she's alone out there, with her odd vision and idiom, not part of any tradition or school. Her narrative line is unpredictable, which can be very trying on the reader.
It is probably even more trying on the writer. Here is Gaitskill, marching on through the jungle, making her own way, with no one before her or beside her. No wonder both she and her characters always seem lost and despairing. Critics aren't an awful lot of help to her; they lazily slot her as wilfully perverse, when all she does is paint what she sees. If she positioned herself as a memoirist or social critic or writer of romantic fiction, she'd have an easier time of it.
Most of the stories here struck me as unfinished and confused in their direction. One exception, "The Arms and Legs of the Lake," is a near-perfect gem, but even so, it is experimental in technique and difficult to read simply as a short story. Basically, eight or ten characters are introduced and interact in the course of a train journey. None of them are given any description by the narrator; all exposition is given from the various characters' points of view. There is a central character with the appropriately anonymous name of Jim Smith, and we quickly learn he is a recent Iraq veteran. Most readers will immediately form a mental image of him, an image that will become more and more wrong as the story progresses. He is a slight black man on the verge of middle-age, perhaps a little crazy, perhaps feebleminded. The other characters project upon him their admiration or pity or contempt, and then make biased and critical judgments of each other. Best character of all is the black conductor on the train, inwardly snorting with contempt both for poor Jim and for the bien-pensant white folks who regard him patronizingly as a symbol of his race.
The whole story is a marvelous cats-cradle of contradictory viewpoints. It stands out in this collection because it's the only time Gaitskill ventures outside her usual garden-patch of ineffectual students and love-weary, aging women. Nevertheless it is scarcely more than a daring, irritating experiment, a tour-de-force of literary tricks and repellent characters. You don't want to meet these people again, and you don't much care what happens to them after the story ends.
The title story is irritating in a different way. Like most Gaitskill stories, it runs on two levels, that of the external action, and that of the main characters' memories and daydreams. Here the external action is a high-concept black comedy. A shallow, self-centered woman has decided to go get herself an Ethiopian baby. That by itself was enough to set my teeth on edge, though I could see Gaitskill meant to irritate me. But what was she was she cooking up? This woman who wants to buy an Ethiopian baby is accompanied by her recently widowed best friend, who imagines the trip will be a nice distraction, a therapeutic vacation. But--bwahaha!--of course it is not. The women arrive in Ethiopia just as this third-world hellhole is erupting into civil war. As their surroundings become ever more grotesque and unendurable, the friend begins to recall all the bad parts of her late marriage--her husband's family's dislike of her, his moodswings, his long descent into Alzheimer's, her own unfaithfulness. Even the hell of Ethiopia and the sound of gunfire cannot drown out these brooding thoughts. There's your classic Gaitskill motif: disaster and collapse on the outside, confusion and despair on the inside.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A Mixed Bag of Stories from an Author Who Deserves Attention
By David Keymer
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.
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