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'Don't Cry' by Mary Gaitskill

Julia Keller | CULTURAL CRITIC

March 14, 2009

There is always a moment in a Mary Gaitskill story when you wince. And then you shrug. The wince means, "Wow, that's a pretty creepy aspect of human nature to point out," while the shrug is a way of acknowledging, "But it's true. Life's really like that, isn't it?"

The Gaitskill two-step—that wince-and-shrug maneuver her work inspires—is what elevates her above other fiction writers who, though talented, are content to give us surfaces. Gaitskill never stops at surfaces. She's too adventurous for that, too reckless.

In her new collection of short stories, "Don't Cry," her fifth book in two decades, Gaitskill is her old fearless self, lifting up the white lace doily that covers so many human experiences to reveal the skanky tangle underneath. Like the characters in her novels "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" and "Veronica," and previous story collections, her people are nervy and intense and bitter and conflicted. They're selfish. They don't play well with others. Yet behind all of that bravado, behind their bad choices, they're just like the rest of us: They want to love and be loved.

And that always ends up being the most surprising thing about Gaitskill, the thing you have to learn over and over again about her: She's a romantic. She believes—maybe reluctantly—in the absolute primacy of human connections, no matter what a mess we tend to make of them.

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In the exquisite title story, easily the best in this collection, a woman accompanies a friend to Ethiopia to adopt an infant. Gaitskill's description of the child is piercingly acute: "The baby was beautiful, fragile and small for his age, with a severe mouth, a high forehead, almond-shaped eyes, and slightly pointed ears that made his gaze seem radically attuned. When you held him, you felt the pure unprotected tenderness of an infant, but in those eyes there also was something uncanny and strong, nascent and vibrating with the desire to take form."

Yet "Don't Cry" is not a heartwarming tale of a noble rescue mission. Gaitskill would never let a story be that simple—because life is never that simple. The narrator, we discover, is haunted by a shameful act from her recent past. "I walked back and forth between the time of the living and the time of the dead," the narrator reflects. "In the middle of my walking, war broke out, and the path between the living and the dead opened up and everything dear to me fell down the crack."

Not every story in this collection makes the grade. Some, such as "Mirror Ball," are tortuously overwrought, or too clever for their own good. But the best—"Description" and "The Little Boy" and "College Town, 1980"—are profound and terrifying, because they tell us more than we may think we want to know about what can happen in life, and about why other people do what they do. Gaitskill, though, clearly thinks we can handle the truth.

In the relentlessness of her vision, Gaitskill is a bit like the character in her story "A Dream of Men," who has been "turned ... inside herself. Even when she was in public, talking to people, or driving through traffic ... she dimly sensed the greater part of herself turned inside, like a bug tunneling in the earth with its tiny sensate legs."

Tunneling her way to the truth: That's the task Gaitskill sets for herself. She's making a path the rest of us can follow—if we dare, if we don't mind wincing and shrugging our way to a perverse enlightenment.

jikeller@tribune.com