Don't Cry: Stories [Hardcover]

Mary Gaitskill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 24, 2009

Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, 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 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; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in “The Arms and Legs of the Lake,” the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson--three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier’s uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls.

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 is characteristic of Gaitskill’s fiction. As intense as Bad Behavior, her first collection of stories, Don’t Cry reflects the profound enrichment of life experience. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths--“the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house,” as one character puts it--remain unchanged.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, March 2009: Mary Gaitskill has a reputation as the chronicler of bad relationships, but that label doesn't do justice to the stories she tells. Her relationships turn bad, or turn good, or just turn (and turn and turn). In every exploitation there's an attraction, or at least an accommodation; in every hostility there's a yearning for, or at least a memory of, connection. You see the intensity of people--friends and family as well as lovers--drawn together, and the often equally intense emptiness when the magnet flips and repels. Gaitskill is one of our best short story writers (that's a label that's fully just) and the prickly, sad brilliance of her last book, Veronica, confirmed her as a master of the novel, too. Don't Cry is just her third story collection in 20 years, after the modern classics Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, and it reminds you immediately of why you've been longing to read her again. Once more, there are former lovers and ex-friends and parents and children who have not quite made a hash of things, but there's also a broadening in this collection, especially in the title story, which looks at the ties of family and friendship when they are stretched across the global distance of privilege and poverty. --Tom Nissley

From Bookmarks Magazine

Ranging from gritty realism to fanciful allegory, the stories in Don’t Cry push the boundaries of fiction in several directions. Populated by peculiar but always authentic characters with bizarre dreams and fantasies, Gaitskill’s stories lack conventional plots, timelines, and mounting suspense, but she keeps readers rapt with the promise of exposing the darkest recesses of human nature. The subtle balance between her spare, clinical prose and the uncomfortably private thoughts and feelings she brings to light give these stories their edge; yet intermittent moments of grace and hope keep her work accessible. Though critics disagreed over which stories were the best, they all praised her pitiless eye, psychological insight, and unsettling ability to turn readers into voyeurs.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (March 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375424199
• ISBN-13: 978-0375424199
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #594,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of our great short story writers with a new collection, mostly good but one real clunker, February 26, 2009

By 

Michael A. Duvernois (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Don't Cry: Stories (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

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."

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag of Stories from an Author Who Deserves Attention, March 13, 2009

By 

David Keymer "David Keymer" (Modesto CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Don't Cry: Stories (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Made Me Want to Cry, March 12, 2009

By 

Vesta Irene (the Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Don't Cry: Stories (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

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.