=Book recently read: Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Ive read several Mary Gaitskill books & loved them all (she's got a new one out now about horses & a middle-aged woman & a troubled teenager that I'm in all likelihood going to skip because I hear its supposed to be heartwarming & shit like that & I don't read Mary Gaitskill to have my heart warmed but to have it pickled ) and I loved this one, too, except for the last story, but I'll come back to that later.

This is Gaitskill's first book, a collection of short stories written nearly thirty years ago, and apparently it caused quite a stir

back then, depicting, as it does, a cast of primarily edgy young women dabbling in prostitution and rough sex and a defiantly bohemian existence. 

Among other things, it was considered the assertion of a new brand of feminism at that time. 

It took me quite awhile to get around to reading "Bad Behavior" because it wasn't readily available at the library branches I most

frequently frequent, but I happened upon it on a shelf

of the Macon branch when we visited there last Friday.

For some unknown reason my right ear was doing that

thing where it felt like it had water in it or something.

It was really annoying.

My husband suggested I sit   sideways on the

seat of the parked car and duck

my head between my knees

and make a low noise in my throat.

I said I'd wait until we got home to do that

since I'd be mortified to have people think I was 

drunk & throwing up in the gutter.

He found that quaint & amusing  since he'd thrown up

in the gutter many a time in his checkered life 

& didn't give a damn

what people thought about it. "True," 

I said. "And I wouldn't either if I were really 

sick or drunk. But there's no sense in making a spectacle
 of myself until I am." 
It occured to me that  so long as one was still
vain enough to care
 how you looked to others

it meant you couldn't be all that sick;
this thought consoled me.

Anyway, I restricted my efforts at first aid

to jamming the forefinger of my right

knuckle into my ear, pushing it around a bit, and

then pulling it away real fast.
It worked fairly well.

Eventually, my ear cleared.

It seemed that finding Mary Gaitskill's "Bad Behavior" also

helped, if only by taking

my mind off the annoying underwater effect my hearing 

had temporarily taken on.

Gaitskill takes a steely unsentimental look at sex & gender relations. Her interrogation of relationships, particularly those between men and women, reveal the sadomasochism of everyday life in a stark nudity under high-intensity lights that makes many readers uncomfortable, others squeamish, and still others downright furious. Certainly things can't be as predatory as she depicts them…can they?

Even more challenging is that Gaitskill dares to subvert the standard politically correct take on these matters by making it clear that it's not a simple matter of male predation and female victimization. There is a kind of person…male or female, but in her stories mainly female…who, for reasons not always traceable to some psychological ready-made malady, or cultural oppression, seeks abuse, craves it, actually. 

You might say that for every slave there is a master.

To Gaitskill's credit, she doesn't take the typically reductive route , 

trying to explain away this passion for submission 

as the result of some past childhood trauma.

Quite the contrary, she usually treats such a predilection

as in-born, unrelated to exterior events

in one's past, a simple fact of one's existence,

like the size of one's feet or the color of one's hair.

When the main character in the story "Secretary" is ordered 

out of the blue by her boss to bend over his desk and pull down her panties to receive a spanking as punishment for a stupid spelling error she's carelessly made in a client letter, 

she does it without protest.

Impossible? Ridiculous? Could never happen, you say?

It could. I  know it could .
How? Simple.

Because if I'd ever had a boss who demanded such thing
of me,

I would have obeyed him, too. 

My face burning with shame, 

humiliated, but ultra-turned on,

I wouldn't be able to disobey.

I wouldn't want to.

Why?

What's "wrong" with me? 

I have theories, but, in truth, I really don't know.

I'm just wired  that way.

Gaitskill's characters are often wired that way, too.

But the crucial thing is that they don't consider themselves

victims even when they're being victimized.

You might say they were "topping from below" as the saying 

goes, and there might be some truth

in that, but  it's only part of the truth.

Brainy, theoretical, and cool, they are detached

and watching from within,

mentally in charge of their apparent submission even as

they give up (temporarily) all control of their bodies.

These women are always smart enough
 to pick "abusers" who they instinctively know won't 

go over the boundary they themselves have set,
even if these boundaries are unspoken.

No Gaitskill character ends up dismembered

in three plastic garbage bags scattered 

among the pampas grass along the Jersey Turnpike.

And there's a good reason for that.

They are playing at victimhood.

They are, first and foremost, survivors.

I hated the last story in this collection. 

"Heaven" was a real stinker that read as if Gaitskill were consciously trying to write the kind of bland middle-of-the-road crap that gets published in magazines like The New Yorker. 

A suburban melodrama of an upper-middle-class family and 

all the usual problems of that white-bread tribe, 

it was a sad & tiresome letdown after all the quirky gems that

otherwise filled "Bad Behavior." 

But I'm sure it served its ostensible purpose, proving to all of 

Gaitskill's critics at the time that she could write

a novel about a "normal" woman.

I read it the way you change the cat litter at

the end of your morning chores:

because it's something that has to be done

before you can say you've finished 

what you started.

I'm afraid her newest novel may be 

far too much like "Heaven" for my liking.

That said, everything else I've ever read by Mary Gaitskill

has been well worth the reading.