Don't Cry: Stories

From the powerful pen of Mary Gaitskill comes DON'T CRY, her first collection of short stories in more than a decade. The tales here are intense and thought-provoking, compelling and often tragic, yet filled with a subtle magic. In just 10 stories Gaitskill explores the spectrum of emotion: lust, greed, sorrow, hope, anger and many forms of love. The opening story, "College Town 1980" follows a group of disaffected young people in Ann Arbor and centers on the slightly older Dolores, who suffers from mental illness. She lives with her younger brother, who's a charming musician, and his strange girlfriend. Dolores spends her days antagonizing waitresses and slowly working on a degree. While there is not much action in the story, there are changes in Dolores as she tries once again to navigate in society and find comfort and strength. Like many of the characters here, Dolores is disconnected --- from herself and from society around her. Gaitskill seems to suggest that this lack of connection may in fact be the norm. "The Agonized Face" is a similar character study. Here the first person narrator is at a literary festival, covering the event as a journalist, observing the writers and figures around her. She is at once drawn to and repelled by the "feminist author" who she hears speak and who reads from her new book. In silently demanding something particular from the author, and from each writer there, she reveals more of herself, her desires and her worldview. All of these stories allow readers to join the characters at interesting, though not always obvious, emotional turning points. A group of people on a train in "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" confront their ideas about soldiers, war, race and mental illness, and the eponymous story, "Don't Cry," follows a woman who has accompanied her friend to Ethiopia to adopt a child. She is frustrated and challenged by the experience, and it becomes, over time, both a cocktail party anecdote and a pivotal and transformative moment. "The Little Boy" and "Mirrorball" are a bit more lyrical and esoteric, lovely even in their depictions of sad realities. Gaitskill's style is both mystical and concrete. Her language is frank and often harsh, but the rhythm of her narrations can be hypnotic as she delves deep into human wants and needs, pain and pleasure. This is not an optimistic collection of stories, and the frankness (about despair, sexuality, loneliness and more) may not appeal to readers looking for anything cheery or uplifting. And, while the book is not perfect --- "Folk Song" never quite coalesces and "A Dream of Men" is almost forgettable --- it's strengths are an unflinching examination of humanity and a powerful voice as well as finely drawn characters who are at once ordinary and extraordinary.

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.

Plot, character development or scene? Despite an overpowering temptation to cite Gaitskill's menagerie of characters in her collection of stories (Don't Cry, Pantheon 2009) as central to her inventions, something altogether different catches my eye. It starts with the literary pedigree that seems to bind a number of her characters together. In "A Dream of Men," Laura remembered a minor incident in a novel she had read by a French writer, in which a teenage boy knocked a nun off a bridge." "The Agonized Face" takes place at an annual literary festival in Toronto. The protagonist speaks of making love even while the images in her head are "subtly flavored" by a novel she is to review. A composer in "Mirror Ball" is bedeviled by ghosts "floating between him and the books he read before going to sleep." Dani in "Today I'm Yours" works "as an editor of a small press distinguished by its embroilment in several lawsuits," and Ella, the narrator, spent "five dreary years" writing a book "that was like a little box with monsters inside it." As told by "The Little Boy's" Bea, the line from another character "I feel so old and so worthless" came after a discussion about Mrs. Dalloway. In "Description" (doubtless ironically echoing a chapter in many a fiction-writing text), Kevin and Joseph argue about which of their classmates would be most published, and compare experiences with Janice, who ran the writing workshop. The narrator of the collection's namesake, "Don't Cry," recalls that while her friend Katya was "having experiences," she was ploddingly "putting herself through a writing program." It would be easy to conclude from this that Gaitskill is drawing from personal experience. But her writing is filled with trapdoors and secret passageways. It all seems too obvious, these traces of literati and arteests earnest and not so earnest. I choose a path somewhat different from others when throwing myself upon Gaitskill's work. In this framework, characters and "Description" should be seen as props -- important elements, but props nonetheless, for flourishes of wit and insight more philosophy than fiction. A few brief excerpts may illustrate this. "On one of those long ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money" (from "The Agonized Face"). "Jennifer tried to imagine what this man's life was like, what had lead him to where he was now. Gray, grim pictures came half-formed to her mind: a little boy growing up in a concrete housing project with a blind face of malicious brick; the boy looking out the window, up at the night sky, kneeling before the television, mesmerized by visions of heroism, goodness and triumph. The boy grown older sitting in a metal chair in a shadowless room of pitiless light, waiting to sign something,

Mary Gaitskill is extraordinarily gifted in her capacity to observe the human condition in all its depth of emotions and motivations, and equally gifted in her ability to give those observations a completely unique voice. Well done!

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.