Customer Reviews

Don't Cry: Stories

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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."

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.

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.

An unsually slow and circuitous writing style that makes for a laborious reading experience. Many of the plotlines are nonlinear and/or stagnated by excessive introspection. Simply does not live up to the excitement and creativity of her earlier work.

Mary Gaitskill's literary landscape starts and ends with sex, although it meanders through other complex human relations along the way. Thirty-one of her short stories, written at about the rate of one a year over the last three or so decades, make up the collections in "Bad Behavior" (1988), "Because They Wanted To" (1997) and, most recently, "Don't Cry" (2009). The release of the paperback edition of "Don't Cry" in March is the occasion for this review.

Sex is complicated stuff. No one knows that better than Gaitskill nor writes about it with more acumen. To summarize her view, sex between a man and a woman is never consensual; its wellsprings are too deeply imbedded in our makeup to permit the knowledge required for assent. As one of her characters puts it, "Sex has been let out of the box, like everything is okay, but no one knows what `everything' is." Still, as her stories make clear, Gaitskill comes as close to getting it as any one can.

In "The Agonized Face" the fourth story in "Don't Cry", Gaitskill cuts to the quick. The narrator, reflecting on an interview she did with a topless dancer who abhorred, and in the next breath, accepted as normal a customer's unwanted buggering, sizes up the dancer's about face this way: "The combination was pathetic, and yet it had the dignity of awful truth. . ..because in the telling of it a certain foundation of humanity was revealed; the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house. . . .We are glad to have the topless dancer to remind us of that dark area in the basement where personality is irrelevant and crude truth prevails. Her philosophical patter [she was big on Hegel and Nietzsche] even added to the power of her story because it created a stark polarity: intelligent words on one side, and mute genitals on the other."

In "Mirror Ball," Gaitskill explores the consequences to a young girl who emotionally over invested in a one-night stand. Traumatized by her rejection - he didn't call the next day or any other day - she manages, but just barely, to recover her soul from the clutches of that experience.

"Description" and "Don't Cry" deal with another one night stand, this one between and older woman teacher and a graduate male student. "Description" describes the encounter from his point of view, "Don't Cry," from hers in the course of her account of accompanying a friend to Addis Ababa who hopes to arrange an off-the-books adoption of an Ethiopian child. The juxtaposition of the two accounts works well. In "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" Gaitskill deals with the post traumatic stress disorder that the Iraq war has inflicted on all of us.

Gaitskill's story collections have all been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. Of the three, "Carnal Knowledge," Craig Seligman's review (February 9, 1997) of "Because They Wanted To" is the most comprehensive. Here's an excerpt from his discussion of "The Dentist," one of the stories in "Because They Wanted To:" Jill, the protagonist, responding to the observation that it would be "`awful' if the mainstream population abandoned its sexual conservatism" responds "`That won't ever happen. . . . Sex . . . means too many things to people. It connects the dirt within, and there's just too much dirt." Seligman goes on to say, " `The dirt within' is what [Gaitskill is] after, because she recognizes it as the secret of personality - the core of our humanity."

Here are the references to the other New York Times reviews: "Bad Behavior" was reviewed by George Garrett on August 21, 1988 under the title, "Fun and Games for Sadomasochists." "Don't Cry" was reviewed by Kathryn Harrison on March 22, 2009, under the title, "Pitiless Eye." There are many articles about Ms.Gaitskill available on Google.

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After reading the first half of the collection, I was prepared to put the book down. The stories were sharp and pointed, with abrupt beginnings and endings. It seemed the sex and violence was added for shock value, rather than as an integral part of the story. I couldn't connect with any of the characters, in fact they raised a feeling of vague disgust. I certainly didn't like them, and I'm not sure the author did either.

The second half of the collection is markedly different from the first. Rather than the relationships of the characters being based on anger, frustration, and self-loathing they seem to be more focused on connection and understanding. Even though there were elements of the stories that were not 'nice', those sections were part of the story and didn't feel added just to have sex and violence. They added to the stories rather than detracted from them.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend this book to many of my friends. Although I really enjoyed 'Today I'm Yours' and 'Don't Cry' and will probably read them again in the future, 'Folk Song' and 'Mirror Ball' did nothing for me. The rest of the collection fell somewhere in between. Although I can admire the author's ability to vividly paint her landscapes and characters with words, I think this is a book for a more particular type of reader. This is not a book I'd pick up for a light, fun-hearted read.

In Don't Cry, Mary Gaitskill presents ten short stories that are sometimes literally connected and sometimes thematically related. Some of these stories are firmly entrenched within the real world, and some, while taking place within the real world, dabble with the metaphorical and metaphysical plane as well. Each of them investigates complex human emotions and Gaitskill proves she is not afraid to tackle any issue.

Gaitskill is a very skilled writer; I have no doubt of that. Her stories were finely written and she delighted me with her rapid shifts in time and perspective (sometimes within the same paragraph). However, by and large, I simply could not invest in her tales on a personal level. I can't believe I am writing this because it sounds so horribly obtuse, but her work in this collection is distinctly female, so much so that I felt alienated by much of it. By no means am I calling her a feminist (though if she is, that's not a bad thing), but generally speaking her stories seemed aimed at women in particular (again, this is not a bad thing).

Now allow me to contradict myself. Two of her works that absolutely held my full attention and thrilled me were "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" and "Don't Cry."

"The Arms and Legs of the Lake" takes place within a train where the point of view shifts from several different people as they interact with one another. It's a very interesting technique and, as a veteran from Iraq is the focal point, I also found it particularly significant.

"Don't Cry" is far more traditional in its execution, but as a new father, this tale depicting a woman trying to adapt a child in Ethiopia during political unrest had me on the edge of my seat and I truly could not put it down until I'd finished it. Even now, it still haunts me.

So while Gaitskill is a talented and skilled writer unafraid to take risks and investigate sophisticated themes, most of her subject matter simply failed to resonant with me. However, even with that being said, the two aforementioned stories were fantastic and made the time spent reading Don't Cry worthwhile.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant

I must admit that I had not really read much Gaitskill before this, and I was blown away. In one or two sentences, she packs so much imagery and wonder, with such a range of characters. There are the stories, the plots, and then the breakdown, the individual sentences. As a writer, "Today I'm Yours," with its author protagonist talking about the "monsters" she had created with her book, spoke to me the most, but all of these stories are gems, the kind you don't want to end - or you do, if only so you can read them again, or read them aloud to someone to jointly marvel at their beauty.

This is the first of Mary Gaitskill's works that I have read. As a whole, I did like the collection. The first story, "College Town, 1980" is an insightful look into the life of a college student, Dolores, and how strength is perceived. The title story is fascinating and thoroughly entertaining, revisiting a character mentioned (but who does not appear) from the previous story, "Description." Janice Braver is a recent widow, and is in Ethiopia to support her friend Katya, who is adopting a child - or hopes to.

While the majority of the stories in "Don't Cry" are enjoyable, there are some tales that simply do not satisfy. "Folk Song" is one of these. While I can't pinpoint exactly why I didn't like it, I'd venture at least far enough to say that it's most likely due to the heavy-handedness of the matter. Serial killers and porn marathons are being woven into a lecture about sexuality, feminism, and gender. Feminism as a whole appears to be a theme. In some tales it's not as prevalent as in others, but it is there.

A definite recommendation for fans and new readers alike.

Mary Gaitskill's collection of ten stories, "Don't Cry" explores the anguish and pervasive nature of human sexuality. The stories tend to show the consequences of treating sexuality in a casual, sometimes recreational manner. Gaitskill's characters typically find themselves diminished, frustrated, and guilt-ridden from their superficial attitude towards sex. This book emphasizes the fundamental, mysterious character of sexuality as a wellspring of human behavior.

Gaitskill also explored human sexuality in her novel "Veronica", her most recent book before this story collection. "Veronica" showed its heroine, a model named Alison, in several locations, including her hometown in New Jersey, San Francisco, Paris, and New York City. The stories in "Don't Cry" are likewise set in a variety of places including Ann Arbor, Toronto, New Paltz,New York, Detroit, and, in the title story of the collection, Ethiopia. Yet the more important setting of each story is in the heart.

Gaitskill is considerably better with women characters than with men. (Men are the leading characters in only two of the stories. In , "Descriptions", the better of the two, two young writers, friends from childhood, go on a hike and discuss their ambitions and their relationships with their female creative writing instructor. The second and weaker story, "The Arms and Legs of the Lake", describes the reaction of a veteran and his travelling companions to the war Iraq.) The women in these stories are generally in their 20's or 30s. They tend to be preoccupied with their looks. They are awkward about their bodies and their sexuality. For example, the opening story "College Town: 1980" is set in Ann Arbor and shows drifting young women with a mixture of shallowness and vulnerability.

Some of the women in Gaitskill's are married, some divorced, and some casually involved with a man -- or with many men. One story, "Today I'm Yours" involves a primarily lesbian relationship between women who move as casually betwen themselves as do men and women in the remaining stories. Many of the stories involve lurid sexual scenes or behaviors. The characters frequently reflect on their relationships with their parents, especially their fathers. Frequently, the settings shift in the stories between present and past. The shifts are sometimes bewilderingly swift and hard to follow. Many of the stories place great emphasis on dreams of the characters as a means of showing what troubles them in their lives.

As an adolescent and young woman, Gaitskill herself had experience as a stripper and as a prostitute, and the stories reflect this in many ways in their treatment of sexuality. Women academics and critics also have prominent roles in the stories. An excellent story bringing several of Gaitskill's themes together is "The Agonized Face" which takes place at a literary convention in Toronto. The narrator, a divorced literary critic, hears a prominent feminist speak at the convention. While sympathetic in part, the narrator concludes that the feminist writer, with her support for the independence of women, does not have a full understanding of the relationship between women and men, of the nature of sexuality, or of its pain. In another excellent story, "Mirror Ball" a young woman engages in a one-night stand with a musician and feels her character and her person diminished permanently by the experience. Gaitskill does not speak as a puritan or in the voice of fundamentalist religion. But her stories are eloquent about the consequences of divorcing sex from human personhood -- a theme explored explicitly in "Folk Song.". A few of the stories in the collection have more topical themes, such as the war in Iraq, and tend to be less successful.

The title story in the collection has a somewhat broader theme than the remaining stories. It describes a middle-aged single American woman who travels to Ethiopia in the hopes of adopting a child to alleviate her loneliness. She travels with an old friend, Janice, whose husband had died six months earlier. Her late husband had been 20 years older than Janice, and he had left another woman to marry her. Before he died, Janice had been unfaithful to him in a short casual affair. The memory of her husband and her brief unfaithfulness torments Janice during the trip to Ethiopia in the midst of its poverty and political instability. The story develops some of Gaitskill's main themes, but it loses something as it broadens out.

The writing in these stories is not at the consistently high level of "Veronica" but they include much that is beautiful and effective. Gaitskill is a writer that does best with her own individual perspective and narrow range of themes. Her stories emphasize the depths of human sexuality and its power to destroy. It is a troubling, important reminder for our day and place.

Robin Friedman