Free-Falling in a World on the Fringe

Mary Gaitskill’s stories are provocative invitations to a grown-up game of truth or dare. They are free-fall immersions into murky expanses, compelling lures to a bath drawn by some dubious stranger.

In one form or another these things often shoot up in discussion around her, around the writing’s rough ride, its harshness. Not the cadence of her prose, but rather the complexity of the dioramas she delicately pieces together, before stepping back to set the works afire.

“I take it as a compliment, but it kind of startles me a little when people say that kind of thing,” Gaitskill explains in a disarmingly fragile voice. She pauses, tucking her legs beneath her on the queen-size bed, situating her small frame behind a room-service tray with a teapot in an L.A. hotel.

In a nudge of a glance, she offers the patch of space on the bed in front of her, the best place, with the afternoon sun waning, for two girls to mull over affairs of head. “It sorta startles me ‘cause it doesn’t seem to me that I’m describing anything that jarring or that fearsome. It seems normal to me.”

With this collection of stories, “Because They Wanted To” (Simon & Schuster), published early this year, Gaitskill once again takes a lifestyles-of-the-fringe-and-near-famous turn through late century American life. These are the overcast, at times, inclement worlds she is drawn to.

What feels most urgent in Gaitskill’s fiction is the notion of survival. What sort of mechanisms one develops to not simply cope, but to press forward. If the first collection, “Bad Behavior” (Poseidon Press, 1988) dropped readers into the chaotic sleep-deprived arena of being 20 in the ‘80s, “Because They Wanted To” circles around a certain sort of terror hovering around the 30s in the ‘90s. Here Gaitskill turns the lights up on people worried about losing their looks, their stamina--their power, sprit and sharpness slipping away.

In “Kiss and Tell,” two lovers poised at the portal of an affair in a disheveled room, step back for a moment in mental inventory: “But they were both over 30; they had lines under their eyes, stains on their teeth, faces that more and more showed the essential confused mildness.”

She writes, in a prose style both blunt and cinematic, about communication’s cul-de-sacs, empty longing, misplaced or discarded lives, numb lovers, pain--both physical and emotional varieties. As the terrain gets mean, so too the people--roaming, brittle artistic types, stunted parents, abandoned children, midtown masochists, business stiffs as somnambulists.

Gaitskill’s trump is the gift of clarity. She pulls in what people daily bury. These harsh-lit studies press points about what silence, avoidance and ambivalence do to lives. When obsession replaces love (“The Dentist”) or when sexual ambivalence creates an ever-widening moat of retreat (“Orchid”).

Numb on TV-talk and tabloid true confession, many fail to recognize the snagged fiber in their own lives. People stare point-blank at wreckage. More precisely: wreckage of their own creation.

“I think for some reason certain painful things leap out at me and reverberate. Like a bell that’s being hit. . . . The really gross obvious injustices are not necessarily the things that hit me as hard,” Gaitskill says. “It’s the emotional things that people do to each other that are unspoken, and nobody fully acknowledges . . . they seem more dangerous to me. I think I saw a lot of it as a kid and was disturbed by it. It just has a real resonance with me and I can’t help but to look and look and look until I can try to figure it out.”

In that investigation come prickly revelations: “People are terrified by her stories,” says Michael Silverblatt, literary critic and producer / host of KCRW’s (88.9 FM) “Bookworm.” “Because people are participating . . . I think we have gotten used to thinking of people as being victims . . . and that we should feel compassionate for them. This is the hallmark of the Raymond Carver story, that people passively suffer their fates as addicts or alcoholics. But in Mary’s work people are actively participating in their ongoing downfall. . . . “

Like Jane Austen’s, Gaitskill’s stories are often cut with levity--whether it is the wry aside or broad, bordering on surreal absurdity. And Gaitskill herself in a self-referential nod has one prototypal character pause after making a complex revelation to a friend: “Am I telling you more than you need to know?”

Gaitskill isn’t posing as a generational interpreter or a clairvoyant spouting definitive answers. “Usually what draws me to write about situations and people is that I feel dismayed or bewildered by them and so I think it’s an attempt to understand it more fully myself,” she says. “I also write to reveal, and not so much to explain because I don’t know if you can really do that with fiction.”

Her first collection, which is a Weegee-like progression of edging-toward-grisly images of post-punk ennui, detachment, sex, and the enthusiastic press around it, catapulted Gaitskill to limelight but, at the same time, restricted her in jacket that she found difficult to wiggle out of. Magazine writers obsessed on her tantalizing history, as a child runaway in Kentucky, a stripper in Toronto, a prostitute in Manhattan.

That box, says Gaitskill, “Trivializes for one thing, but for another, it implies that in defending myself . . . which I don’t . . . but if I do, that I’m somehow buying into this notion, that there is such a thing as a very stupid standard of what is good. And then saying I’m rebelling against that. And that’s just hopeless and I’ve never in my life or my writing done that.”

Predictably, Gaitskill has knotty feelings about maturity--its gifts; its robbery: “Much to my surprise, my 30s were generally much better than my 20s. My 20s, were so horrible. It wasn’t a living hell, but, generally, I was unhappy.”

Now 42, she supports her writing life by teaching creative writing at the University of Houston, and is a frequent contributor of reviews and status-quo-toppling think pieces to Elle and Mirabella. She is settling--relatively speaking anyway--into a quieter life.

“I also think that it’s difficult to lose your youth. It was hard to grow older, not just in terms of vanity. It’s a mixed thing. I’m not torturing myself so much with what I should be doing and how things should be. I’m much more forgiving of myself and of other people. Things are just much softer for me in a way. Not in a sentimental way, but a more expanded way.”

Life is unwieldy, expansive, juts out and makes a mess of things. And that aspect of life is what jerks and shouts at the center of Gaitskill’s prose. “I had a conversation about my writing with my mother and she said, ‘I just don’t understand why you write about such miserable people who can’t find relationships. All these people just seem to be fighting with each other. Can’t you imagine writing about people who can just work these things through and come out of it? Something like Henry James?’ ”

Gaitskill pauses. The light almost gone, a chuckle comes out of the darkness. “I’m thinking, I don’t know why she came up with that, but she probably isn’t remembering that his people torture each other. And they are worse off than my people, because they are completely locked in. They are not moving an inch. At least my people are trying to figure out something else.”