Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Just like her short story collection, Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill's novel, Two Girls Fat and Thin, left me speechless. The story seemed simple enough: the thin girl is interviewing the fat girl about her time working for the author/cult leader, Anna Granite. They are both wary of each other, the interviewer thinks the interviewee is crazy and the interviewee feels that her entire belief system is under attack by the interviewer. But in the end a strange friendship/bond/understanding will form between the two of them. But its so much more than that. While I completely appreciate all the goofy reincarnation of Ayn Rand (can I assume that she's the object of ridicule throughout the book!?), I can't help but be drawn into the actual lives of Dorothy and Justine. Dorothy's affiliation with a literary cult leader seems almost unnecessary, though executed perfectly. However its the `compare and contrast' of these two women's lives that really makes the story - how they are terribly different physically and emotionally, BUT how they are also very similar. They both share strange and horrible relationships with their parents, were both molested as young children and have finally achieved a sense of independence just before their meeting. You get complete character dissections of each of them: what they want, what they think they want and what they already had. Where both women have unresolved unresolved conflicts from their past, its too late to doing anything about them. It seems that their acquaintanceship, while mistrustful at first is their stepping stone to personal redemption. Mary Gaitskill is yet again justly perverse and sexual, especially through Justine and her trysts through childhood and her current ill-suited lover and sadist, Bryan. Dorothy recounts her painful years of being an overweight girl growing up and only finding acceptance within Anna Granite's circle. Two Girls, Fat and Thin is an amazing book - with very wise and witty language. There are many moments when Gaitskill sums up in a few words everything you need to know about what creates strong relationships between strangers. These are not stereotypical characters, these are not trite and uncomplicated scenes. For a book that will give you a lot to think about and won't require a dictionary to get through, you can't go wrong.

Most people will read this book for the intriguing way Gaitskill unfolds the characters relationship to their own sexuality and self image. The excerpt from this book that wasy in the anthology High Risk even focuses there and those qualities are supreme in this novel.But truth be told what I enjoyed most was her treatment of the Objectionist movement - she did a marvelous job of parodying it and pointing out how some people's ego can obscure the entire points they are trying to make.If you haven't read this book, please do! It succeeds on so many different levels!!

I thought this was an excellent book, but I fail to see that any careful reader could conclude that the author is sympathetic to Rand's views, as some of the previous reviewers suggested. I found it to be a devastating satire of the bombast and cruelty of so-called Objectivism.

Mary Gaitskill's Two Girls, Fat and Thin is a brilliantly satiric but nonetheless disturbingly realistic story of how cults appeal to the alienated and confused precisely by providing them with a sense of belonging and simple answers to complex questions. And, given the mixed messages they receive daily about gender, sexuality, identity, empowerment and the body (see any issue of YM, for example, or, for that matter, Cosmopolitan), it's hard to imagine anyone with greater potential for alienation and confusion that the adolescent American female. In Gaitskill's hilariously parodic roman a clef, the two girls of the title, "fat" Dorothy and "thin" Justine, are taken in by the "Definitivist" philosophy of one Anna Granite, in a transparently veiled, hysterically accurate spoof of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism." Anyone who's suffered through Rand's didactic, overwrought novels will be delighted by such details, such parodies within the parody, as Granite's fictional fictions, The Bulwark and The Gods Disdained. And given the essential similarities between Granite and Rand, Definitivism and Objectivism, Gaitskill's novel makes it difficult to see how anybody takes the latter seriously, although the Rand cult continues apace nonetheless (see Jeff Walker's excellent study, The Ayn Rand Cult [LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999]). It's funny, and disturbing, beacuse it's true ...

A meticulous graceful and merciless exploration of the inner worlds of young women coping with an abusive past is connected to the wider reality in the context of Ayn Rand's objectivism. This is an ingenious chimera and it definitely adds to the eerieness of the novel. Gaitskill has a microscopic scrutiny of human behvior and emotions combined with unique lingual ability to render them in full force. Her treatment of what is apparntly Objectivism by Ayn Rand is not unsympathetic (in my view). She approaches well trodden fields such as individuality, social convention and power relations in a fresh way. It does not detract from the psychological aspects of the novel and its protean literary auqlities. The degree of lonliness depicted seems unrealistic unless taken metaphorically for alienation. As a male reader I find it difficult to accept the role relegated to my sex in the novel. Few readers will look at their own childhood the same. One need not be a survivor of abuse. To the contrary. A familiar, yet well suppressed, experiences such as witnessing one's mother farting is reconnected to all the hidden mesh of one's intimate and unavoidable reality.