Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill. Taking a short break from Joyce Carol Oates, I turned my attention to another short story collection that I borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library, this one by Mary Gaitskill.

Certain authors are by nature destined to polarize opinion. Mary Gaitskill is one of those authors. If you look at the customer reviews on Amazon, she's the kind of writer who'll garner 27 five-star reviews and 27 one-star reviews for the same book. As the cliche goes, it seems you either love her or hate her. 

Being the sort of person I am, I usually go straight to the negative reviews. I do this because it's almost always the case that the things most people dislike about books (or practically anything else for that matter) are usually the very things I like best. In Mary Gaitskill's case the rap against her is that she writes stories that are relentlessly sordid, about people who are dysfunctional, at least by conventional standards of normality. She writes a lot about "deviant" sexuality, in particular, lesbianism and the various manifestations of sadomasochism in human relationships, whether emotional or physical. This seems to make a lot of readers uncomfortable. They say "enough already with this wallowing in the mire! Enough already with the lesbians. One or two stories is okay, but does almost every story have to be about dykes and bisexuals, erotic cutting, and consensual rape?!" 

To which I would reply, "Hell, I sure hope so! If it were in my power, I'd make it the law!" 

In her Wikipedia article Gaitskill, responding to her interest in such matters and her literary influences, is quoted as having said "I don't think much of Sade as a writer, although I enjoyed beating off to him as a child."

This interests me. I remember reading Sade as a child with a hand in my panties and a hopeful anticipation only to be disappointed, vaguely nauseated, and completely turned off by the absolute coldness, impersonality, and mechanical nature of his descriptions of torture and death. I've known plenty of guys who said that Sade turned them on—it always seemed to confirm for me that a guy's sexuality must come from the moon—but until Gaitskill I can't recall having come across a woman who claimed Sade rang her sexual chimes.

What I can relate to, however, is what one character says in a story titled "Stuff." "I'm not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me." 

A statement like this is probably the dividing line determining whether you're on the side of the chasm with those who love Gaitskill or you're on the side with those who hate her. You either understand what Gaitskill is expressing here or it sounds like something coming from some place even further away than the moon, beyond our galaxy. For me, it expresses something essential about my particular incarnation as a human being.

Gaitskill's stories are not about mainstream characters. And if you're a mainstream character and not interested in those who aren't, you're probably not going to be on the same wavelength at which these stories are written. Her characters are generally the sort that over-think life, sex, art—everything. They're touchy and eccentric. They are hyperaware of the constant fluctuations that occur beneath the apparent stability of our lives, the perpetual oscillation of all our thoughts and emotions. Within the span of a single embrace, her characters are apt to fall in and out and in and out of love again. In a typical scene, a woman impulsively and playfully slaps tapioca pudding onto her lover's vagina during a moment of intimacy and is shocked when her lover takes it the wrong way, gets disgusted, and asks her to leave.

An alienated father finds his old rage and bitterness boiling back to the surface when he learns that his daughter has sold a story to "Self" magazine about her coming-out as a lesbian and their complicated, imperfect relationship. A teenage runaway takes a  babysitting job only to find herself stuck caring for the three small children when a young mother doesn't return from a supposed job interview. A rape survivor meets a man some thirteen years younger and develops an improbable and unexpected relationship based on the emotional minefield of their joint sexual fantasies. A middle-age man is driven to share intimate and unsavory details of his life with an attractive woman sitting beside him on a plane who happens to remind him of a woman he once abused. A woman writer falls in love, absurdly and obsessively, with her bland, boring dentist during the painful and complicated extraction of one of her wisdom teeth.

In a final sequence of related stories that can be read either alone or together, a middle-aged bisexual poet and teacher at Berkeley finds herself adrift between three lovers—an enigmatic young man, a damaged submissive woman, and an older sociology professor in the midst of a divorce who is trying start life over in what seems to him a strange new world.

What rescues these stories from being cheaply sensationalistic or merely exploitative is the exquisiteness of Gaitskill's prose, her ability to deftly describe even the subtlest shifts of arousal, repulsion, love, and hate within any and every encounter. And she does this in an elevated language that is as poetic, even ecstatic, as the acts she describes are often base and humiliating. Of a simple embrace, Gaitskill describes a woman feeling her lover's body as "made of bright fluxing atoms, forming and disintegrating in secret patterns, determined in their private purpose, and delighted if it made no earthly sense." Her interest in sadomasochism is not only sexual, not even primarily sexual, but ultimately spiritual (which is why I'm surprised that she finds Sade satisfying on any level).  

Mary Gaitskill is not to everyone's taste. So it's as little use trying to tell someone who enjoys her, finds her savory and delicious, as I do, that she tastes bad as it is to force her down the throat of someone who prefers the sunnier, middle-of-the-road fiction of an Anna Quindlen, for instance. Nor is there any point in trying to sugarcoat Gaitskill's work as if she were a bitter but valuable corrective pill. She speaks to those she speaks to and to others she's a grating, unbearable noise. But as a smart, sophisticated, transgressive writer with her pen on the pulse of what life is like today for those who swim in the counter currents beneath the mainstream, she's one of the best there be.