Because They Wanted To

December 30, 1996
In "The Dentist," a story about a magazine writer's sexual infatuation with her bland, middle-aged dentist, a billboard for Obsession perfume looms over the protagonist's neighborhood, projecting a "strange arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want." Like that billboard, the nine stories in Gaitskill's third book (after the novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin) hold a mirror up to a 30-something zeitgeist of emotional dysfunction, chronicling people paralyzed by unappeasable desires and trapped by abusive families and relationships. The landscape is a familiar one--of support groups and public health clinics, funky neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest and lower Manhattan inhabited by writers, musicians and sex workers. With her crisp prose and withering eye for detail, Gaitskill invests these scenes with psychological vividness and desolate poignancy. The title story is a portrait of a resilient 16-year-old who runs away from home in the wake of her parent's divorce and takes a job in Vancouver babysitting for a financially desperate mother of three. The disgruntled protagonist of the opening story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," disturbed that his estranged lesbian daughter has published a self-help essay about him in a national magazine, ponders the divide between parents and children. In the four-part final story, "The Wrong Thing," a 39-year-old poetry teacher tries to remain stoic in the face of a series of erotic but loveless flings. It's telling that Gaitskill's title is an unfinished sentence, for the theme that binds these stories together is an emotional modality shared by a cast of unhappy people, whose sordid fantasy lives and small gestures of compassion allow them to keep at bay the meaninglessness and despair of the everyday.

January 1, 1997
Many of the stories in Gaitskill's new collection conform to the same structure, shifting between present and memory, depicting the past catching up to her characters. In "The Girl on the Plane," a man meets a woman who resembles a college classmate, and their conversation elicits in his mind the sordid details of his role in a drunken gang-rape. In "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," a young woman writes about her father for Self. While driving to purchase the magazine, the father reflects on her childhood. "Orchid" details the reunion of two college roommates--Margot, a lesbian, and Patrick, a Lothario--and how smoldering memories can blaze when provoked. Gaitskill's characters thrive on the frontiers of sexual identity, where they search for love that can coexist with the traumatic histories that burden them, and the stories they inhabit reflect their complexity--opting for simple survival over reductive resolution. Often, for Gaitskill, the striking of a single sustained note of self-knowledge is enough to keep a chorus of insoluble problems at bay. Recommended.--Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal"

Copyright 1997 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 1997
The author of "Bad Behavior" (1988) and the novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" (1991) is back with a second short story collection, limning life's betrayals, communication breakdowns, and sexual frustrations in eight stories and a novella. In the collection's title story, a punkish runaway takes on a responsible job but discovers her boss is all too irresponsible. In "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," a middle-aged father struggles to grasp what went so wrong in his relationship with his thirtyish, lesbian daughter. "Orchid" views nostalgia and emotional isolation when two college friends meet in midlife. The narrator of Gaitskill's novella," The Wrong Thing," may capture the mood of many of these characters when she opens "Turgor," the first of its four sections, by responding to a casual "How are you?" with "I have deep longings that will never be satisfied." Her remark is, she observes, "the kind of thing that I enjoy saying at the moment but that has a nasty reverb. I want it to be a joke, but I'm afraid it's not." ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)

September 15, 1996
Bad Behavior (LJ 6/1/88), good writing; here are more stories from the highly regarded Gaitskill.