In Mary Gaitskill’s 1997 short story ‘Orchid’, two characters approaching middle age encounter each other on the street in Seattle. Margot is a social worker, Patrick a former actor turned ‘psychopharmacologist’. They had been college roommates and, once, nearly lovers; this passage recounts, from Margot’s perspective, the beginning of their friendship:

When they got to the diner, they ordered coffee and sweet, gelatinous pies. The tone of their conversation changed. Seated and eating, Margot no longer felt the solicitousness or the light changeability she had sensed during the walk. Patrick just looked at her and talked about nothing. Her mind wandered, taking in the shabby, genial diner with pleasure. On the walls there were cheap paintings of landscapes and animals that nevertheless looked as if the artists had cared about them. There were plastic flowers on each table. The sugar containers had big lumps of stale sugar in them. Their waitress was a small woman in her thirties with beautiful, fierce eyes. One of her legs was withered, but her carriage was determined and erect. Patrick said, ‘It’s just that I feel so invisible. I just feel so invisible.’  

It is a paragraph of short and simple sentences in which almost nothing happens. The objects in the scene (paintings, sugar, legs) are described with clear single adjectives (cheap, stale, withered); in a few instances, pairs of adjectives almost seem to strike a contrapposto: the first leans one way, then the other takes us in a slightly different direction (sweet, gelatinous; shabby, genial; beautiful, fierce). The material details are subliminal clues to Margot’s state of mind. The paintings are cheap yet evoke care; the flowers are plastic but trouble has been taken to ensure there are some on ‘each’ table; the sugar is stale but every container is filled with it; the waitress is small in stature but her gaze is potent, her bearing impaired but proud (note the slight change in register – the old-fashioned ‘carriage’, ‘withered’, ‘erect’ – as though the sentence itself is straining to stand above the utilitarian language that has come before). The scene is static – nothing moves, bar Margot’s mind – yet it is alive with suggestive, ambiguous information about her, and her attitude to Patrick: is he really ‘talking about nothing’? Is ‘talking about nothing’ even possible? Either way, by the time he declares he feels invisible, and Margot zones back in, he has become so. The story has progressed without action, character and dynamics revealed through observation alone.

Across three short story collections, three novels and four decades’ worth of essays, Gaitskill has pursued a practice of extreme noticing. Born in Kentucky in 1954, raised in the suburbs of Detroit, she ran away as a teenager to San Francisco, then Toronto, before returning home where she studied at the University of Michigan. In 1981 she moved to New York. Her reputation as a writer of sex and sexual misadventure was established in 1988 with Bad Behaviour (‘Fun and Games for Sadomasochists’, ran the headline of the New York Times review). Its nine short stories occupy the same social world – seven are set in Manhattan – and though three are told from a male perspective, the collection’s principal characters are women growing out of youth and into a new autonomy. The language is piercingly clear, almost journalistic in register (‘She wasn’t a directionless girl adrift in a monstrous city, wandering from one confusing social situation to the next, having stupid affairs. She was a bohemian experimenting.’). Though the tales chronicle their sexual and romantic encounters, the characters are, in Turgenev’s phrase, ‘alone as a finger’.

Because They Wanted To (1997) was an expansion of range – geographical, psychological and stylistic: the male perspective more frequent, the American West and Midwest the location for a number of the stories, which reveal Gaitskill’s preoccupation with what we might call a national atmosphere, observed through small acts in small towns. The collection ends with a novella, ‘The Wrong Thing’, told from the point of view of Susan, whose linguistic idiosyncrasies are given full expression (vases and statuettes in a Thai restaurant evoke ‘foreignness honourably yet unctuously’), as she transitions from an encounter with an effete male sadomasochist to an on-off relationship with a younger lesbian who often needs to ‘process’ events. There is a greater wryness to these stories – the protagonists inhabit their roles more confidently than the impoverished neurotics of Bad Behaviour. In ‘The Dentist’, when a stripper is insulted during a photoshoot, the photographer leaps to her defence: ‘“It’s okay,” said the stripper mildly. “I am a bitch.” Nine years after her break-out success, Gaitskill was having more fun.

Sex and noticing; what is the relationship between Gaitskill’s subject matter and her method? According to Freud, the eye is the ‘zone’ that is ‘the most likely to be stimulated by virtue of that special quality of excitation whose occasion we describe as beauty in the sexual object.’ Note the association of gazing, of observing, not with the sexual act itself, but with the first stage of pleasure – excitement. This, too, is where Gaitskill trains her focus. Notwithstanding her reputation, sex itself is dealt with laconically in her fiction – of far greater interest to her is the build-up, the creation of tension, and what each character might seek to gain through the act. Her best-known short story, ‘Secretary’, in Bad Behaviour, about a young woman typist spanked for her spelling mistakes by her small-time lawyer boss, is less concerned with office sexual politics than its protagonist’s discovery of masturbation. Gaitskill’s recent ‘updated’ version, ‘Minority Report’, published in the New Yorker, strikes an unusually didactic tone; it has Debbie return to challenge her former employer even as she struggles to identify precisely what he has done to her. In both versions, a local journalist phones to ask Debbie to denounce the lawyer. ‘I was so upset I stopped trying to climax’, 2023 Debbie recalls, but in 1988 Gaitskill opted to end the story on a note of dissociative ambivalence. After the call, Debbie curls up on a mildewed couch in her parents’ basement, able to watch herself ‘from another place. … it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all.’

Each of Gaitskill’s novels has a corresponding story collection: Bad Behaviour’s is Veronica, started in 1992 and published in 2005. Its narrator, Alison, is a classic Gaitskillian protagonist: a teenager who runs away from her lower-middle-class suburban family to become a model in Paris. The story is told in a series of recollections as Alison, now middle-aged and living in a small town in Marin County, California (where Gaitskill herself moved for a period in the late ‘80s), grows sick from Hepatitis-C, and cleans the offices of the photographer who abetted an assault on her at the start of her career. Alison is disillusioned with the fashion industry; her lifelong quest to understand beauty (the novel opens with a childhood memory of a parable about the punishment of a vain girl) instead finds fullest expression in a character study of her friend and one-time colleague, Veronica, ‘a plump thirty-seven-year-old with bleached-blond hair’ who dresses in ‘mannish’ plaid suits with matching bow-ties. As soon as we meet her, we learn that Veronica will die of AIDS. The novel is a study of the ravages of disease on once-strong women, but it is also about the power of first impressions, specifically, the alacrity with which women assess each other, and how that assessment strengthens, deepens and mutates over time. Gaitskill is exceptionally attentive to the noticing that goes on between women; competition is there, certainly, but sorority, generosity and curiosity too.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) shares the nimble humour of Because They Wanted To. Its protagonist Dorothy Never not only confidently inhabits her world; one suspects she is also, in part, its fabulator. Dorothy (fat) is interviewed, after a proofreading nightshift, in her cramped apartment by an aspiring journalist, Justine Shade (thin) – the sinister name, with its nudges at Sade and Nabokov, suggests perfidious invention, a character in the shape of an archetype. Justine is interested in Dorothy’s experiences with an Ayn Rand-esque philosophical movement, a development that places Dorothy at the centre of a story for the first time in her life. A dual Bildungsroman, the women’s childhoods, puberties and sexual experiences are revealed to have lain the tracks for their collision and eventual absorption into one another. Gaitskill’s fiction is generally intra-mural, but Two Girls is by far the most extreme example, a novel that happens almost entirely indoors – clinics, offices, conference suites, gyms, restaurants, hotel rooms. Dorothy’s boredom and frustration are conveyed through her stuffy containment, the drama never escaping the chamber.

Completing the trio is The Mare (2015) and the collection Don’t Cry (2009), two books in which Gaitskill moves subtly but perceptibly from psychological to sociological inquiry. In The Mare, four decades separates the two central characters. Ginger is an artist in her fifties, married without children, while Velvet, eight when the novel opens, is the daughter of a Puerto Rican single mother in Brooklyn sent upstate to a summer camp for ‘disadvantaged’ children. This distance – of class and race, as well as generation – affords each character a lateral view of the other; the impossibility of sustained contact sharpens their respective attention, and with it the intensity of feeling. It is the least successful of Gaitskill’s novels, as she herself has admitted. An attempt to reckon with how socio-economic position shapes character, human detail – the fruit of her noticing – is too often sacrificed.

Gaitskill’s interest in animals, however, comes to the fore, in part as a way of writing about motherhood without mothers, who tend to be passive and disappointing in her earlier fiction, full of potential but eclipsed by the overbearing presence of fathers. Ginger and Velvet’s relationship plays out around an abused horse that the young girl resolves to tame. In Lost Cat (2020) – the autobiographical essay on which (some of) Ginger’s part of the story is based – Gaitskill draws the comparison directly when describing her adoption of a feral Tuscan kitten, ‘Human love is grossly flawed, and even when it isn’t, people routinely misunderstand it, reject it, use it or manipulate it … an animal can receive love far more easily than even a very young human.’ Loving animals is a way of caring for the vulnerable without sacrificing the freedoms of the childless woman; of engaging maternal instincts while remaining ambivalent towards reproduction itself.

If Gaitskill’s two great subjects had been women and America, in that order, in the early 2000s she reversed the priority. The possibility of what she calls ‘gentleness’ in American culture runs through her writing of the last two decades. In Lost Cat she writes that ‘if gentleness can be brutish, cruelty can sometimes be so closely wound in with sensitivity and gentleness that it is hard to know what is what.’ In ‘This Doughty Nose’, an essay on The Armies of the Night and An American Dream, she determines that Norman Mailer’s claim to be ‘the gentlest person in the room’ during his appearance on the Dick Cavett show was ‘quite possibly true, even if Mailer did head-butt Vidal in the dressing room, even if, yes, he did foully stab his wife at a drunken party.’ Violence and gentleness seem to have emerged as themes in response to the invasion of Iraq – three of the final four stories in Don’t Cry mention the war directly. While ‘The Arms and Legs of the Lake’ adopts the same technique of shifting perspective as The Mare, moving round the passengers of a train en route to Syracuse as they react to a disturbed veteran in their midst, ‘Description’ contains only a fleeting reference to a brother on active duty. But this absence becomes foundational to the story’s world, and is echoed in the final story of the collection, ‘Don’t Cry’, in which a creative writing teacher accompanies a friend to Ethiopia to adopt a child and becomes trapped in Addis Ababa by street fighting. One family torn apart by American militarism, another formed under the blanket power of American imperialism. The personal can’t be separated from the national, nor intentions isolated from circumstances.

Since 2020, Gaitskill has maintained a semi-regular habit of publishing short essays, ruminations and links to favourite songs and videos via Substack (an activity she refers to as her first foray into ‘social media’). The first two instalments juxtaposed the importance of the physical world with the disconnection fostered by online life. Gaitskill’s disdain for the cultural side effects of the internet is understandable. Her writing is distinctly analogue – tactile, full of breath and texture; voice is crucial to character, as is ‘carriage’, location and climate – which is part of what makes it so appealing, especially to a certain demographic (I belong to it): women born in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s during a generational volta in the development of technological modernity. The pre-digital age she insists still forms the flesh of human experience is within our early memories. At a bar in the summer, a woman in her mid-fifties approached my table. She had noticed that I was reading Two Girls, Fat and Thin and wanted to tell me that she, too, had read it at my age, while travelling around America with her sister. Gaitskill’s work seems to foster such old-fashioned moments of recognition. In her writing, women notice each other. The distance between us briefly collapses before we go our separate ways.

Read on: JoAnn Wypijewski, ‘Home Alone’, NLR 93.