Mary Gaitskill's Collection "Don't Cry "is a Bit of a Bore

Don’t Cry, Mary Gaitskill’s third collection of stories, which came out earlier this year, was a painful read for me. I did not find the stories so shocking as others have, but I did find them mostly tiresome.

I used to teach the story “Romantic Weekend,” from Gairskill’s first collection Bad Behavior that was published to some buzz about her “bad girl” image some twenty years ago. “Romantic Weekend” features some soft-core wannabe sadomasochism and posed some interesting questions about the male desire for dominance and the popular image of woman as submissive victim. However, the story had little to do with classic literary sadomasochism, which is always more drama than dominance, but it raised the hackles of some and titillated others. Bad Behavior also included a story that Director Steven Shainberg used as the basis for his 2002 movie Secretary, which starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as a woman who cut herself and James Spader as a dominating boss—a cast made in heaven for a match made in hell.

Don’t Cry has elicited such Book Review headlines as “Gaitskill’s Tales Draw Blood,” “Peep Show of Violence and Self-Contempt,” “Pitiless Eye,” Princess of Darkness,” “Walk in the Dark,” and “Mary, Mary, Ever So Contrary.” But this is not so much “Naughty Mary” as it is “Wearisome Mary.”

The stories are not clearly delineated narratives; rather, they are more like essayistic descriptions of ensemble groups positioned around one central character’s sense of disengagement and despair. I will comment on only one story, “The Agonized Face,” for it seems central and typical. The narrator has been assigned to write a piece on a feminist author who is giving a talk at an annual literary festival. The author was once a prostitute and has described prostitutes as feminist fighters against patriarchy. She talks about how she has been treated unfairly by the media, insisting that although she can understand it is exciting to imagine a kooky person off doing unimaginable stuff, that she is not that person. She complains that when we isolate qualities that seem exciting and scary and project them on a person, we deny that person her humanity and cheat ourselves of life’s complexity.

One wonders if this is a reference to the initial public interest in Gaitskill’s work after Bad Behavior was published, which created a great deal of publicity buzz about the fact that she had once been a stripper. When an interviewer asked her if she had ever turned a trick, without hesitation she replied that she had, earning Gaitskill a reputation that perhaps she has since regretted.

Much of “The Agonized Face” reads like a personal essay on whether feminists have made girls into sluts who think they have to have sex all the time or whether they have overprotected them into thinking they have been raped when they were just having sex. Various images of Gaitskill’s own persona crop up in the story. For example, when the narrator tells about interviewing a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her eyes, who is big on Hegel and Nietzsche, one is tempted to turn to the jacket cover of the Don’t Cry for the picture of Gaitskill staring out at the reader both defensively and belligerently. Recalling another story she once wrote about a TV talk show that depicted stories of rape victims, the narrator wonders if the feminist author was suggesting that rape and being a prostitute were the same thing, concluding, in her essayistic tone, that for the purposes of her “discussion,” they are close enough.

The article the narrator finally writes takes the feminist writer to task for pretending that female humiliation is an especially smart kind of game and casually mentioning her experience with prostitution, while leaving out the “agonized face” of women’s humiliation in modern society. In her article, she metaphorically chases the author down an alley, to stone her and force her to show the face that she denies. For she insists the “agonized face” is one of the few mysteries left to women and must be protected.

Generally, I found most of Gaitskill’s stories didactic and tedious, rambling and discursive. In an essay in the collection Why I Write, she says she writes because even when it is about pain and horror, she has a powerful desire to say, “Yes, I see. I feel. I hear. This is what it’s like.” I am, of course, very interested in finding “what it’s like,” but I don’t need to be subjected to a lecture disguised as a short story. I would like to hear what women readers of this blog think about the stories of Mary Gaitskill.

GUEST STORY: The Sky of Fire

I'm going to be honest. I think this is the best story Jason has written to date.


They lit the sky on fire. The planet was dying. They released chemicals into the atmosphere that were supposed to turn the pollution into clean air. It didn’t work. The sky is made of lead. It rains bullets. You would’ve thought we’d have learned our lesson, but we are worse now then ever.

I am certainly the last man alive. I am the lucky one, or the unlucky one depending on your point of view. I was testing a space suit beneath the manmade ocean when they ran their experiment. I lost all communications, and when I emerged from the bowels of the rapidly evaporating Cerulean Ocean, I was crushed with twice the amount of pressure than from the bottom of the sea, the planets new atmosphere. The space suit works like we hoped it would.

I immediately take shelter from the metallic storm, in the space test center where this suit was designed. No one else is alive. Dead bodies fill the rooms like Armageddon. They don’t even look like human beings anymore. An epiphany strikes me, and I sink to the bottom of my suit. Every living thing on the planet just died at the same moment less then an hour ago. Every bird plucked out of the sky in mid flight, every forest and every creature living inside every tree, every person I have ever known or ever loved. Dead. Although odors can’t pass through the vacuum that is my suit, I can still smell the death, and it makes me vomit.

You can read the rest by ordering it on Amazon for the Kindle, or by .PDF which will be emailed to you through the Paypal button below:

Completing PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories: 2009

Well, my “road trip” with family has now ended—after 34 days and 15 states on the road in a big RV with in-laws and an aging dog. I did not have time to do blog entries on the road, but did finish reading the PEN/O. Henry Prize stories: 2009. The more stories I read, the less impressed with them I was. I began to wonder if the editor and the publishers were more interested in creating a politically correct mix of cultural and ethnic stories than in choosing the “best stories of the year.”

I am, of course, interested in the trials and values of cultures other than my own. But if my primary literary interest were in cultural “information,” I could get that from a variety of other sources. Surely, we come to good fiction for more than that. Manuel Munoz’s “Tell Him About Brother John” creates an interesting character and an engaging voice, but it seems primary about the cultural difference between “here” and “Over There.” Viet Dinh’s “Substitutes” consists primarily of interesting information about how those who stayed after the fall of Saigon, especially children, have fared under the Communists. Paul Yoon’s “And We Will Be There” seems to fall into the same trap of other stories of Chinese and Japanese characters in this collection—presenting characters as simple, childlike figures. I wish someone would explain to me why authors so often present Asian people in this way.

Another issue I would like to raise in this post is how stories “illustrate” certain ideas. Judy Troy’s “The Order of Things” seems so purposely calculated to illustrate the St. Thomas quote--“The important thing is not to think much but to love much”—that the initial interest I had in the two characters is obliterated when, at the end, I realized that they are only two dimensional illustrative figures. Nadine Gordimer’s “The Beneficiary,” on the other hand, is so complexly woven around the complex ideas of “acting” and “being” that when I get to the end and read the punch line—“Nothing to do with DNA”—I don’t feel that the characters are reduced to mere illustrations. I am engaged by the complexity of Charlotte’s position between her actor father and the man who has acted as her father.

I liked Paul Theroux’s “Twenty-Four Stories,” for each one of them was so filled with thematic or dramatic potential that they illustrated the central short story characteristic of “much in little.” But then I have always liked Theroux’s work.

I have never cared much for Marisa Silver’s work, however. One of the most important aspects of the short story to which I am always sensitive is whether the author seems to really care for his or her characters. The brilliance of Chekhov, for example, is that he never condescended to the people in his stories, regardless of their background or weaknesses. Silver, in my opinion, does not seem to care for her characters, merely using them for her own narrow purposes.

I enjoyed “Darkness,” even though I thought the question/answer technique was aggravating. I liked it for the same reasons I have always liked fantasy fiction. It illustrates an interesting idea, while allowing a little escape from everyday realism.

Finally, there is Junot Diaz’s “Wildwood,” which is actually the second chapter of his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for 2008. The central character and point of view is Oscar’s sister, who is locked in a battle of wills with her dominating mother. Laura Furman, the editor of the collection, obviously likes stories of mother/daughter conflicts, as this is not the only one in the book.

I liked the chapter. I cannot really call it a short story, even though The New Yorker paid Diaz a lot of money for it as a short story. Perhaps I should say that while it is not a very good short story, it may indeed be a pretty good chapter of a longer work. I am currently reading The Brief Wondrous Life and find myself caught up in the life of Oscar—an overweight DR nerd and social misfit. I must confess, I was not a great fan of Diaz’s first book, the highly praised collection of stories entitled Drown. The book created a great cultural buzz when it was published several years ago, and everyone eagerly awaited Diaz’s first novel, which was a long time coming. According to the critics, it was worth the wait. I don’t know yet. As I read it, I like the voices I hear, but it has all the characteristics of the novel as a form with which I get impatient—it is just filled with “stuff.”

I did my duty and read all the stories in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: 2009 collection. But I was disappointed. Surely of the hundreds of stories published in English each year, there are better ones than these. I am hoping for better when Best American Short Stories comes out in early October.

I promise to be more regular on this blog now that my summer road trip is over. Thanks to all those who read it.I hope it is both interesting and helpful.

GUEST STORY: True Lust

UPDATE: Since this is the story that gets by far and away the most traffic on the blog, I would like to direct you to where Jason and I are selling short stories for the Kindle like this one. For his click this link, for mine, click this one.

My little brother is back again with another short story. I'll have one up myself in the next week myself. Follow us and spread the word if you like this stuff.

(Also, I've posted a smattering of poetry since this went up, but put it behind this post. You can read it here and here.)

Hello, this is Jason. I would just like to say to anyone that is about to read this story that I appreciate anyone that does take the time to read it, and if you have any thoughts afterwards feel free to leave a comment. As I can only assume I will learn more with input.

Far from apologizing, I would also like to state that this is an experimental piece for me. Being the first story I have ever finished that wasn’t a comedy. I had fun writing it, and I hope you enjoy reading it. Here goes:

Does true love really exist?

She looks into my eyes, and there isn’t anywhere else I would rather be. Her naked skin is smooth and flawless. I lightly dig my nose into her neck and suck in a deep breath of her beauty. She smells perfect. Her white skin rests on the white sheets like an angel in the candlelight. I take a breast in each hand and caress them softly. She lets out a shallow moan and then smiles up at me warmly. I bring my ear to her cheek that’s as soft as a silk and grope her body while I kiss her on the lips and I know I’m in love.

We wake up at the same time and look into each other’s eyes for hours. Our sweaty legs are tangled together and our hands exchange each other’s chests. I pull her closer until our chests touch. It isn’t close enough. We keep each other warm with our body heat, and I feel the warm blood rushing through her veins. She lightly closes her eyes, and I kiss her eyelids gently. We fall back asleep until god knows what time.

When we wake up, we decide to get dressed and go for a walk. I get ready quickly so that I can watch her dress. She puts her panties on sensually in front of a mirror and then bends down reaching for her bra that was thrown on the floor. She picks it up gracefully, watching her get ready, is to watch her perform a dance. When she sees I’m watching her in the mirror she smiles, but does not stop. Next she puts on her stockings pulling them tightly up her silky long legs. I resist the temptation to undress her, and make love to her again. She bends all the way over to grab her blouse in the bottom drawer of her dresser. She’s teasing me.

We take a long walk through the park in the sunset holding hands. Walking slowly so it will never have to end. We stop at a park bench and sit down. There’s a clearing in the tree’s allowing us to see the deep orange horizon. It’s beautiful. I put my arm around her exposed back, and she gives me an unexpected kiss. I’ve kissed her a thousand times since last night, but this one is set apart from the others. It feels like true love. My mind swims to the future, I feel like we are going to be happy forever. The sun sets into oblivion, and the night air rolls through the park. I give her my jacket, and we finish our walk through the gallant twilight.

It’s still early yet, and we decide to go out for a night on the town. We end up at a posh French restaurant and she orders the most conservative thing on the menu. Always thinking about my pocket book. I tell her it doesn’t matter what she orders, if I have the means I’ll buy it for her. She tells me it’s really all she wants. I order the most expensive wine on the menu anyway, just to show her that money isn’t an issue. The food is wonderful and she looks stunning in the restaurants dim light. We enjoy ourselves and have a marvelous time.

When she steps away to the ladies room, I pull out a small box containing a necklace I’ve been keeping secret from her. Putting the small box in front of her plate I wait for her return. The suspense and being away from her make the wait seem like hours. On her return, the mere sight of the box on the table makes her jump with excitement. She opens the gift quickly and says she adores it instantly. I suggest to her that we go back home and make love, but she says that she wants to show her new necklace off, and so off we go.

We end up at a dive bar. A band plays songs about drugs and lust. We order beers and the bartender doesn’t stop looking at her cleavage. I forget to tip him, but I hate to admit I like the attention she gets. Her flawless teeth shine through her perfect smile, and I have fun despite myself. I think, “as long as she’s happy, I can enjoy myself.” She’s the most beautiful woman in the whole bar, and everyone is looking at her. The women in the bar whisper to each other. I imagine they are calling her names, masking their jealousy. Other men gather the courage to come over and flirt with her presumptuously. I hold her hand defensively, while I listen for her to tell them she is spoken for. The night sails on in the same manner until it’s late.

I talk to her about leaving soon, but she doesn’t want to go until the band stops playing. Looking past her for a second to the entrance of the bar. I see a goddess enter. Her majestic curves make my heart race. She wears a fiery red dress cut low exposing her firm perfect legs. Her eyes twinkle like starlight. She walks to the bar like the goddess she is. I must speak to her, but I have no idea how. How can I break away from my girl without breaking her heart?

The Goddess reaches across the bar to pay for her drink, and I wish I were next to her buying it for her. She swings her hair and turns towards me. Her beauty is insurmountable, and her lips are like that of a succubus. I look down at my girl and she is looking back at me. She isn’t smiling anymore. My opportunity to meet the goddess is fleeting. I’ll take anything I can get. Uninterested, I ask my girl if she wants to leave, I don’t even listen to her response. For at that very instant the goddess spills her drink fifteen feet from me. In a clumsy attempt I push other men out of my way trying to get to her before it’s to late. I succeed, and with a napkin I help dry her dress. She smells like an angel. She thanks me, and we have a short awkward conversation. Her voice is like a harp, and I learn her name. I’m in heaven.

Looking back at my girl, she holds her hands on her hips ashamed. I go back to her with a poor excuse, she anticipates hearing it, and is eager to accept it. She wants to leave immediately, but I delay her as long as I can. Every moment I gaze at the goddess is a moment I will keep with me forever. Eventually, unavoidably, my girl drags me from the bar and back home.

I get her home and I tear her cloths off. Turning out all the lights, we fuck while I think about the sultry vixen of my dreams. After I finish, I lie on my side thinking about the goddess. My girl turns the other way, and I hear her weep. I whisper the goddesses name as I go to sleep, and when I wake up I’ll find her and make her mine.

Love and Loss

It must be spring or something, because all of this poetry is coming out of nowhere. Did someone put some type of hex on me? (Hell, I did these two just a couple of days ago, too...)

In any case, I hope this stuff doesn't suck. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm not a poet.

1) Love:

When I'm not with you
the only thing I can feel
is a tightness in my chest,
a deep and gorgeous thirst
for your angelic presence.

The moment I can bask in it once more,
a grin creeps across my face
and I can feel angels
hoisting my heart to the heavens.

When we drink together,
you think me a lightweight,
but my secret is this:
you intoxicate me already.

2) Loss:

It was over.
You were gone.
And in my sorrow
I took to the hills,
to clear my head,
to wonder why,
to escape the city noise.
The songs of the birds
no longer sounded sweet,
but shattered,
bitter,
and hurt.
Breathing in,
fresh mountain air
filled the hole in my heart.
Breathing out,
left that hole twice as empty.
Though I found no answers,
and left as perplexed
and as saddened as when I arrived,
at least the view was beautiful.

More Stories from 2009 PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories

I am sorry to be away from this blog so long, but I have been on the road with family. We stopped a few days ago in Jackson, Mississippi to visit the home of Eudora Welty, one of my favorite writers. What impressed me most about this lovely Tudor style home just across the street from Belhaven College was its unpretentiousness, just like its wonderful former owner. The kitchen looked right out of the late forties and there were books stacked in every room.

I have been reading more stories in the 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize stories and have the time today to make a few comments, which hopefully will stimulate some discussion among the readers of this blog.

“Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress” by Mohan Sikka—The story is told from the point of view of a man who is recalling when he was ten and living with his grandparents. I am afraid I am not familiar with the changing values of the Indian family that Sikka says is the background fro his story. What I like most about the story is the way Sikka develops the character of the conniving grandmother, who feels that by destroying the relationship of Uncle Musto and the younger Rose, she can make her husband pay for an indiscretion in the past when such relationships were more tolerated. What leaves a sour taste for the grandmother at the end and for the reader also, at least this reader, is how ultimately the servant class pays the price for the crime--based on the lingering assumption that two years in jail is something the servant can more easily bear than members of the military class to which the grandfather and grandmother belong.

“Kind” by L.E. Miller—I was not really engaged by this story. The central interest seems to be Edith, the kind of woman who has chosen a life of “voluntary poverty,” which I assume refers to the emotional poverty of her life. I guess I don’t really see the relationship between the narrator Ann and Edith. What is Ann’s stake in the story?

“Icebergs” by Alistair Morgan—What Morgan calls the main themes of his story—loneliness and isolation—come through very strongly for me. I am engaged by the narrator who has lost his wife and is losing his daughter. But what Morgan calls the peripheral context for the story—the real events of an African finance minister stealing money from his country—seem to me to have no relevance to those themes. Morgan says the back story “moves the plot,” but if the plot has nothing to do with the themes, then what is the point of the plot except merely to be plot—stuff that happens? If it is not meaningful stuff, then why is it in the story?

“The Camera and the Cobra” by Roger Nash—I like this story, but then I am a sucker for a story that is so tightly wound with imagery that it seems more a poem or a picture or a parable than a narrative. I like the image of the ants in the camera. I like the imagery of things appearing and disappearing, of alternating moments of uncertainty and clarity. If you did not suspect that Nash was a philosopher after reading this story, you would know it for sure when you read his discussion of the background for the story—a discussion as dense in its way as the story itself.

John Burnside's "The Bell Ringer": PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, 2009

If you want to read a paradigmatic example of the traditional lyrical/realistic short story, innovated by Chekhov (Collected Stories) and Turgenev (Sportsman’s Sketches) and then developed by Joyce (Dubliners) and Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), take a look at John Burnside’s “The Bell Ringer.”

Burnside’s discussion of the creative origins of his story suggests that he is well aware of this tradition. He says he started thinking about the story when he thought of how important bells, usually church bells, were to the community—to announce the outbreak of war, the return of peace, marriages, deaths, and important social occasions. Since the community was often defined by the reach of the bells, with those “beyond the peal” deemed to be outside that parish, he started thinking that maybe an experienced listener could not only determine by the tenor of the bells what they signified socially, but also “the secrets of individual bell ringers—their hidden wishes, their secret desires and fears, their private loneliness.” It’s a nice trope, fanciful, but somehow believable.

The key characteristics of the Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson lyrical/realistic tradition are all here: The “loneliness” that Frank O’Connor discusses in The Lonely Voice, the “secrets desires and fears” of an individual in a small community, a central metaphor that embodies the loneliness and secrets.

I don’t want to give a plot summary here, for another element of this short story tradition is, of course, the emphasis placed on the ending of the story, what Joyce described as an epiphany. Eva, the central character, has lost her father, lives in an old family house in a village in Scotland, is often alone because her husband works in other countries. She doesn’t really mind being alone, for there is little love or intimacy between her and her husband. Her one friend is her sister-in-law, who confides in her that she is having an affair. She joins a bell-ringing club so she can meet people. She does not make friends at the club, but she does become infatuated with a young American.

What I like about the story is the fictional world Burnside creates—a kind of reality/unreality that is both the world of everyday and the world of fantasy and fairytale. The story begins with Eva thinking the landscape around her looks like a children’s-book illustration, the snow steady and insistent in a kingdom that had succumbed to the bad fairy’s spell and slept for a hundred years in a viridian web of gossamer and thorns.” When she goes to the church for the bell-ringing in the tower, she thinks of the location as a “pagan place, a dark garden of yews and straggling roses and, at its center, the stone church, with its altar and its font and, above it all, the bells, suspended in the chill air of the belfry, heavy and still, waiting to be brought to life.” I like that rhythm.

The ending is announced this way: “It was like watching a conjurer perform a magic trick, when you shouldn’t really care, because you know it’s an illusion, but you just have to figure how it’s done.” The ending is absolutely inevitable and even predictable, but still a surprise. I like it when a story does that. I like it when everything comes together in a pleasurable little gasp.

If you like this story and you have not read all your Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson, then you have a lot of wonderful short story reading ahead of you. And while you are at it, read the two very finest contemporary short story writers in this tradition—Alice Munro and William Trevor.