Customer Reviews

Bad Behavior

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W.H. Auden said something to the effect that there are a few books that we each feel were written for us, so perfectly do they speak our innermost thoughts and feelings, perhaps previously unknown even to ourselves. This is one of those books for me, and it's a true stroke of luck that I found it. I wish I knew how to identify who else it might be such a book for--perhaps the hip, the black-wearing, the eating-disordered, the dirty-minded (specifically S&M-minded), the fashionable or the completely fashion-oblivious, the young rocker or writer or painter with a hated day job he can't seem to get rid of. But I am few of those things; I am quiet and conventional in my outer life, and yet this book was like a bomb for me. Most essentially, it is part of the small subterannean body of literature written by the troubled and for them, and who could more desperately need their own literary voice?

The stories are about unhappy young urban women having unhappy, dirty sex, but they are not erotica--they are stories to feel and think to, not to do something else to. The upcoming movie "Secretary" is based on a story of the same name here, although the secretary in the movie is thin and pretty and seems (from the preview) to grow into a sort of third-wave feminist sex cheerleader, while the secretary of the story is fat and deeply ashamed. She is the exception, however, in being a victim in a fairly simple way--most of the women are far more active. The final story, "Heaven," is a beautiful coda to the book. All the women appear without any families, and you might wonder who the families of such unconventional women could possibly be. Heaven answers that, making the book's first visit to the suburbs and providing a mutely conventional set of older parents. The story has in its final scene a perfect stillness on the surface, and you can only wonder what is roiling unobserved below.

This wonderful book may not be better known because it goes so deeply into certain feelings and ways of life that not everyone shares. But that makes it all the more special for those it speaks to. A precious, precious jewel.

Sounds like I'm one of the few who knew absolutely nothing about Mary Gaitskill before purchasing "Bad Behavior." In fact, I'd seen (and really enjoyed - great film!) the movie "Secretary" and had no idea it was inspired by a short story in this collection.

My first exposure to Mary Gaitskill was the short story (from this collection, but I'd read it first in another) "A Romantic Weekend" - something of a long vignette about a would-be S&M romance between an egotistical married lawyer and a fawning, neurotic wannabe submissive. Unlike a lot of contemporary short fiction - with its focus on immediate scene, action and dialogue - "A Romantic Weekend" took the time to map out each of its central characters interior lives in a lively and descriptive way that encouraged me to read more. So, I stumbled upon a used copy of "Bad Behavior" and figured "what the hell?"

I give Gaitskill credit for needling at some tender nerves - stories about drug addiction, emotional abuse, sexual neurosis, prostitution and sado-masochism abound in this collection. Maybe my favorite story in the book is "Connection," about a woman (Sarah) who returns to New York after five years. Told almost entirely through backstory, "Connection" recounts Sarah's competitive relationship with Leisha - a dangerous game of sexual and drug abuse one-upsmanship that crumbled their relationship. Gaitskill is utterly unsympathetic in every way and she has a knack for biting dialogue and markers that bring her (for the most part, repellent) characters to life.

The problem with this collection is that there is nobody to sympathize with. The quintessential Gaitskill character is female, a prostitute or a slut, a drug user and either a hopelessly neurotic or ridiculously pretentious freak. Hey, they're vivid characters, but there's nobody here I'd like to have a beer with. About three stories in I started to feel like I was being re-introduced to the same character over and over again, and the persistently negative tone of Gaitskill's stories don't exactly make this a fun read. I suspect Gaitskill is better read as one entre in an anthology of stories by multiple authors. There's only so much of this stuff a guy can take in one sitting!

Overall though, I give "Bad Behavior" points for some highly inventive descriptions and prose, and for Gaitskill's clear and compelling (at least @ first) voice. If Joyce Carol Oates wrote for a more urban, Gen-X audience, it'd come out sounding a lot like this. Worth a look, but I'd recommend checking out a story or two first before deciding whether you're up for an entire book of Gaitskill's bad boys and the women who deserve them. The Tin House fiction reader features her story "A Bestial Noise" - that'd be a good place to start.

I'd like to add: I KNOW this review won't get many "helpful" votes. Most people who visit an item at Amazon (myself included) check out books they're already familiar with or like, so anything short of gushing praise is bound to come across as unhelpful to the true believers around here. But it's the truth. Mary Gaitskill is a talented writer who seems to write the same story over and over again. It's a good story. But it does get old over the course of an anthology. Like I said, she's probably better read as one entre in an anthology, where the overwhelming negativity and in my opinion, her almost juvenile need to shock can be taken in small doses. Over the course of 200 pages I started to lose interest in yet another over-sexed neurotic - take it for what it's worth.

Gaitskill coolly anatomizes with great skill the dark side of human relationships. Her occasional metaphor is bondage both literal and emotional, but it's never used in a cheap or exploitative way. She writes of sympathetic young women who go through cruel hell (sometimes self-inflicted) before gaining wisdom and maturity. You may wince as you recognize your own teen-age and young adult follies. I find Gaitskill darkly funny and terribly moving. Her lucid, razor-sharp prose is a real pleasure. And as a man who is sometimes baffled by women, I think I learned something.

I read BAD BEHAVIOR after seeing Gaitskill's blurb on the cover of another Amazon.com purchase, THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez. Like that novel, BAD BEHAVIOR is about the misfits (artists, wannabe-writers) of New York City's East Village. Also more of a high-minded literary work and a little less "youthful" than THE LOSERS' CLUB, BAD BEHAVIOR cuts to bone in its portrayal of damaged, neurotic young (mostly creative) people trying to find a place in the claustrophobic and dark recesses of the big city and their incapacity to connect with each other.

I found this collection of interwoven stories oddly compelling and, sadly, all too true to life. Many of the stories' relationships have an S/M theme, which in some cases implies a certain damage of the main characters, a certain comfort to be found in pain. The S/M quality of the stories is not portrayed in a titillating way as it might show up in a bit of erotica, but almost as a symptom of the characters' sad inability to relate to each other in a quote-unquote normal way - and often the characters' sexual tendencies tend to frustrate and alienate them even more.

Frankly, I recognized myself in these stories -- and it made me realize that the thing standing between achieving my goals and my personal happiness -- my greatest enemy -- is myself.

I recommend BAD BEHAVIOR highly. You don't have to be from New York City to relate to it -- I live in LA. But make sure you're in a safe place emotionally before you sit down to read it. Like all great art, it's disturbing and unforgettable -- full of truth -- and it can leave you feeling more than a little bit exposed.

Mary Gaitskill understands compulsion well. She takes you along the fringe and down the dark alleys of sexual urgency without pandering or exploiting. These stories are not designed to titillate, although some of them may. There is nothing mechanical, cliched, or pornographic about them. They are stories about the desire for intimacy--or at least some sense of contact--and the difficulty of achieving it. Stories of passion mixed with cold calculation. Is this the "other"? Or is this you and me? The harsh light of "perverseness" throws these issues into even sharper relief. A particulary fine example of this is the ironically titled story, "A Romantic Weekend," which manages to be both sad and comical. Gaitskill takes a detached view of her characters, but is not pitiless. Her ability to sketch them so precisely presupposes a degree of affection, or acceptance.

While all writing is, in a sense, saturated with the person who wrote it, Mary Gaitskill is one writer who seems to wear her deepest preoccupations (and neuroses) very close to the surface of her fiction. After reading her two collections of short stories and her novel, a particular troubled young woman emerges as the reccuring, almost obsessive, motif of her writing - brown-haired, slim, dreamy, bookish, perceptive, and isolated, with inclinations toward S&M and bisexuality, a history of terrible relationships, stripping and/or prostitution, and a desire to become a writer. This character often drifts on the edges of a hip New York underground, yet feels marginalized. She appears, in various permutations, across most of these 11 stories.
I've been a little reductive here, I suppose, and I should probably say that none of this is anywhere near as pretentious, seamy or self-indulgent as it sounds. Gaitskill is occasionally indicted for being just another trendy "people who wear black" writer, plumbing the psyches of the tragically hip as though it's some essential window into the human soul. She is definitely guilty of this, but she also redeems herself, mainly because she writes so well. Some of the stories here are a little bit embryonic for me, and seem a bit like a half-finished draft submitted to a writing class - e.g. "An Affair, Edited." Still, even in these weaker stories, Gaitskill will supply some acutely observed little image, or quick line that chisels right into human psychology, and it's enough to take your breath away. She's often been praised for her razor-sharp vision, and I think it's her best attribute. My favourite stories here are "A Romantic Weekend", a painfully bleak comedy involving a young woman who's been seduced by cultural fantasies of the masochistic female but discovers she doesn't really like the reality after all, especially when it's divorced from romance completely, and is purely an act of sad degredation at the hands of a creep; and the melancholy pastoral, "Heaven", a series of beautifully observed vignettes revolving around the upheavals of a suburban family. Another notable is "Connection", which explores the strangely desperate, monkey-grip friendship of two college girls who drift apart, exposing with a kind of sadistic clarity the mix of self-obsession and insecurity that propelled the relationship in the first place. I also found the story "Something Nice" compelling, telling the tale of a young prostitute and an older man who becomes infatuated with her.
There's voyeuristic pleasure in all this, and sometimes I wish Gaitskill would turn her sharp eye to something a little less Calvin Klein ad. She can do this, and does it well later in her career. Still, there's plenty to admire and enjoy in these stories, all of which possess a strange pathos. In spite of the pseudo-glamour that's always tarnished Gaitskill, she has a remarkable understanding of people, and a genuine sense of what it means to be dislocated and alone.

Gaitskill's prose is dense with specific objects and vivid description, but it never seems like too much, like catalogues of the items in a room or rosters of encyclopedic detail. Instead, there are objects like flowers "in the ugly pastel paper the florist would staple around then", descriptions which undercut idealizations the characters try so desperately to maintain about their lives. Whenever they get too flighty or self-important, especially about love or romance, Gaitskill sticks in a well-chosen detail to reveal their absurdities. When Fred says "It was like a honeymoon," Jane replies, "Oh, it was not".

The stories are funny, often witty, and yet, and yet...sad, as the hopes and vulnerabilities of her characters thrust nakedly into the open. Somehow, I want those characters to get something more than they have, even if they aren't nice, or are a little creepy, or do things people typically disapprove of. .

I think the stories are funny, because they ring pathetically true. They are full of people who want, want desperately, desperately want things so badly they'll try to get them in ways that aren't in their best interests. Those desires, I think, give the stories an energy and tension that really makes reading them interesting. And why, when the secretary hikes up her skirt, I want to intervene, thinking "No! don't!...she's not really going to...oh, my, she's really...". Yeah. Horrific and strangely intriguing.

What they most want, it seems, is some sort of human connection. I don't think the characters find it. Lines like "this was the only kind of connection you could have with people-intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete", point to such a conclusion. The fact that Susan doesn't get Leisha on the phone at the end, that Fred goes home alone forgetting his wife's present also point to this. But the desire for intimate connection is so strong in the stories, such a deep desire for the characters, that we see what extremes they're willing to go through to get a chance at it. That's how wanted, needed, important it is. And how ultimately unreachable.

Gaitskill also seems to have a real knack for characterizing people quickly and vividly. Like the stretch-pants woman, or the Korean housewife. My favorite parts are the ones when characters obsess about things like being embraced, "supported by a soft ball of puffy blue stuff". He he. Where the character realizes that it is "stupid or corny", but continues to wish for things like that anyway. The tone is ironic; not every sentence is deathly serious. Or maybe I'm disturbed that some people take such red-paper-valentine, blue-puffy-cloud stuff so completely seriously. There's a difference between indulging a fantasy and believing that the world operates that way.

Years later I still remember the impact Gaitskill's book had on me. I believe her insight into relationships and the darker side of human sexuality is second to none. (By the way, I've recently discovered Dennis Cooper, whose themes are similar though far darker.)

In a highly graphic and incredibly well written book of short stories, Gaitskill creates a picture of sociopathy. In this collection of 9 short stories, Gaitskill runs the gamut of human bad behaviors. From College Girls and Prospective Writers practicing prostitution, to lesbianism, to homosexuality, to adultery, to just plain inappropriate social conduct, Gaitskill gives us an up close and personal look at the seemlier side of human interaction.

With a particularly well constructed style, each story uses incredible sentence structure, well placed profanity and illustrative descriptions of people doing the things that no one admits to doing. Yes, the "bad behavior" in society is really rampant within American society.

Each story deals with a different type of aberrant activity. The book culminates with a brilliantly written story, "Heaven" that describes the disintegration of an entire family. First one child then the next and finally the death of one is only followed by suffering and pain for all involved. Everyone gets divorced except the parents. Yet the parents see their children as failures, and thus themselves as failures as well.

While the book is not for the faint of heart, it is superb. For a look inside American society that is mostly hidden, this book brings it to the surface. It is strongly recommended for all readers who wish to see behind the curtain of façade, into the real life activities of so many men and women in America today.

This review is certainly long over-due, as Mary Gaitskill's BAD BEHAVIOR has become one of my favorite books and has greatly influenced my own short fiction. Unfortunately, many people insist on comparing the book (mainly the short story, "Secretary"), to the movie Secretary. Yes, yes, the movie was fantastic, again one of my favorites, but Gaitskill's collection and vision focuses on much darker tones. Her writing is not meant to be erotic, but rather plays up on some of the sexual violence that some people misunderstand as affection. Anyway, comparing BAD BEHAVIOR to the movie is like comparing apples and oranges. You should base your expectations of one based on the other or else you'll probably be disappointed.

BAD BEHAVIOR features nine stories involving protagonists who feel incomplete and are constantly searching for some human connection. The collection opens up with the daring story, "Daisey's Valentine", involving two very unlikely lovers who work together in a used bookstore. Daisey is a very incompetent girl, who has very good intentions, but is constantly cheating on her boyfriend. She is immature and certainly dull-witted, but likeable. Her co-worker, Joey, becomes infactuated with her after he has become disillusioned with his own relationship to his house-bound, drug taking girlfriend. Though both characters are completely reliant on thier significant others for financial support, they get involved are left on their own to defend for themselves. It is Daisey who suffers the most, realizing that her poor decisions have left her in the loving arms of a worthless drug addict. Like most of the stories, "Daisey's Valentine" ends rather abruptly, as the mix-matched couple is loitering on the front steps of a rather expensive apartment complex. An upper-class couple is disgusted by them and warns that if the two are not gone by the time they return, they will call the police. Joey's solution is to ignore the threat and thinks about getting high while Daisey feels insulted/threatened by this and has suddenly lost all sense of dignity.

The book features two brothel stories, which I think are excellent additions to Gaitskill's themes of isolation, human connection and our need to mentally create a safe haven. In one of the stories, a prosititute tells her clients that all the girls there are working "temporarily", waiting for their big break as an actress or a writer. This is a very common psyche of most of Gaitskill's characters, who all desperately cling to the hope that better things are on the way. This certainly correlates with the writer's personal experience, having run away from home in her teens to work as a stripper and later being hospitalized for a short time.

In "Secretary", the BDSM fairy tale aspect of the movie has been forsaken to illustrate a very homey girl's seduction by her deviant employer. Orginally, Debbie had used the secretary position as an escape from her dysfunctional family, but finds that the lawyer tries to involve her with his s/m fantasies and occassionally spanks her over his desk for any typos. Debbie is torn between the feelings of molestation and her general lust for the lawyer. However, as he pushes her further than she is willing to go, Debbie abruptly quits her job and hides her secretive guilt of the affair from her family. She is however left with a new understanding of the time she spent seeing her childhood psychologist.

BAD BEHAVIOR is shocking, sexual and very intimate. Mary Gaitskill writes stories of affairs, deviant sex and obscure relationships with very real characters. This book is certainly not for children, but to an open-minded adult who is willing to step behind the eyes of a masochist for a change. Her stories deal with extraordinary situations but almost anyone can relate to the characters' aggressions and longings.

If you haven't read it - you're missing out.