Don't Cry

Mary Gaitskill is a terrific writer, but not for all tastes. I first came across her in her debut short-story collection, Bad Behavior, which had a number of stories about prostitutes and masochistic women. Her latest collection of ten stories, Don't Cry, doesn't have any stories about prostitutes per se, but it does feature many similarly broken people. Consider this paragraph, from the opening story, "College Town, 1980": "When her father came to visit her in the mental hospital, right after Allan had dumped her, she'd said, 'Daddy, I want you to beat me.' He'd turned away and licked his lips. Dolores didn't see why he should balk at that: he'd been beating her mother for years."

Or consider the opening sentence from "An Old Virgin": "Laura was walking around her apartment in a flannel nightgown with green-and-yellow flowers on it, muttering, 'Ugly cunt, ugly cunt.'" And Laura is not the old virgin of the story.

If one can accept that Gaitskill's stories will take them places they otherwise might not want to go, one can savor the exquisite writing. I was taken with a story titled "Folk Song," which is more of an essay tying together three stories on one page of the newspaper: a convicted murderer appears on a talk show, a woman announces plans to break the record for having intercourse with the most men in a row (1,000, it turns out) and two turtles are stolen from the Bronx Zoo. Another story, "Mirror Ball," casts a one-night stand as if it were part of a fairy tale. In "Today I'm Yours" a woman recalls an affair she had with another woman, while "The Little Boy" covers a woman's encounter with a woman and child in the Detroit airport (I've been to that airport many times, so I knew exactly what Gaitskill was talking about when she described the moving mural).

Instead of prostitutes, Don't Cry is full of stories about writers. In "The Agonized Face" a woman goes to a book festival and is annoyed by a so-called feminist writer: "She was a feminist who had apparently been a prostitute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prostitutes as fighters against the patriarchy." Given Gaitskill's past, one wonders whether she is that feminist writer. The last two and best stories of the collection, which are connected by one character, involve people in M.F.A. writing programs. "Description" finds two life-long friends and recent graduates of such a program going for a hike. One of them is dealing with his mother's illness, the other has had an affair with a teacher who he really doesn't like. That teacher narrates the title story, which sees her go off to Africa with a friend who is trying to adopt a baby. Both tales are richly woven and expertly crafted.

The only story that I didn't think worked was "The Arms and Legs of the Lake," which involves several different people on a train going up the Hudson River line. The narrative switches from character to character, and focuses on two men who were recently soldiers in Iraq. I found it to be facile, giving lip service to the conditions of veterans without offering any particular insight.

Aside from that story, Don't Cry contains several eye-opening examples of Gaitskill's abilities.