On "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" by Mary Gaitskill (5436 words) ****

Mirroring certain themes in Mary Gaitskill's other stories, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," the lead tale in her second collection, Because They Wanted To, starts off with real promise. A man receives a phone call from a friend. His daughter is in a magazine called Self. So begins the father's reflections on this woman he hardly knows anymore and on his own fatherhood, for the article is in fact about him. What makes the story so powerful is the clash of lifestyles, values, and generations. Here are parents who try to "raise their daughter right" but who nonetheless end up with a lesbian. Their rejection of her, their slow halfway acceptance, it's all right here in Gaitskill's piece. And that tiny, smiling daddy--let's just say there's a parent in each one of us we're supposed to get in touch with. Get it? Yeah, neither does the narrator. But we get glimpses of an answer in the relationship we see recounted between the father and the father's own dad. Read the story here or listen to Gaitskill read part of it here.

On "Lockwood's Lawn" by Mary Gaitskill (3223 words) ***

This as-yet-uncollected story by Mary Gaitskill tells the tale of two generations. In that sense, it's a familiar one--parents with differing values from their children. Often such stories end with a certain amount of understanding. I'm reminded of Jayne Anne Phillips's "Home," which while not exactly ending in a place that scales the two generations together in terms of values does come part of that distance in terms of feeling. Gaitskill leaves us no such loveliness. Mr. Lockwood doesn't understand his daughters. He finds his own values don't seem to match those of the world anymore but continues to live by them anyway, and while he tries to reach out to his daughters, he seems more to have given in and given up. Louise, the last one left at home, sits depressed in her room--possibly having been broken up with, possibly just feeling low self-esteem. Either way, the dad here (as well as the mom) seems to be able to find no response that will work to bring her back from her misery. Like the boys who bother Mr. Lockwood by stumbling across his lawn, Lockwood seems to view the men in his daughters' lives as crooks of the sexual sort--crooks who the daughters seem not to mind stumbling over them. Unable to let go of his children, Lockwood seems paralyzed in a past that doesn't exist. Read the story here at Blip.

On "Don't Cry" by Mary Gaitskill ***

Mary Gaitskill's most recent collection treads much of the same ground as her two earlier collections but also opens up a few new pathways. Readers familiar with her work know that she often delves into discomforting situations. The collection Bad Behavior does this more--and arguably better--than either of the succeeding collections: prostitutes meeting customers in real life long after having given up the business, women forced into awkward sexual situations by their employers, sadomasochistic lovers. Each collection for me, however, has become unfortunately less interesting.

Don't Cry's strongest stories come at the start and at the close of the collection. The leadoff, "College Town, 1980," my favorite here, seems vintage Gaitskill. I'd have difficulty describing exactly what happens, for it's one of those stories in which characters you find interesting do very little. These are people going nowhere fast, struggling just to keep themselves together. The focus in one girl, Delores, who's living with her brother and his girlfriend and one other roommate, taking a few classes, and trying to keep herself from falling deeper into insanity. Our encounter with her is breathtaking. "Don't Cry," the title story, ends the collection. Here, we focus on two women going to adopt a child in Ethiopia--a much tamer story than many of Gaitskill's other pieces in earlier collections, and one that shows a writer at her full maturity. This is paired with the story before it, "Description," when we learn of one incident that is shared between the two pieces. "Description" has power of its own, especially at its end, though it also felt a bit forced to me toward the early going (it's one of those stories about creative writing workshops, which tends to get an automatic groan from me).

Other pieces focus on a one-night stand turned into an obsession (written a bit too abstractly for my tastes); lesbian lovers remeeting after the passage of many years; an old woman who finds solace in helping a little boy by talking to him, under the impression that his own mother doesn't care about him; a Iraq War vet who touches a woman on a train and gets kicked off (told from multiple points of view, it's one of Gaitskill's most ambitious but arguably one of her less successful); and a woman who meets an old virgin (clearly not a story written from the point of view of an old virgin).

"The Agonized Face" offers a particularly interesting set of observations. It's set at a book fair, and the narrator is a reporter sent there to cover it. The narrator is particularly fascinated by a feminist writer who writes sexually explicit stories. Much in this piece, one could dangerously see as Gaitskill's own description of her philosophy of writing. I say dangerously because this is fiction, and she is working through characters, none of whom may actually speak for her. Finally "Folk Song" is a story that seems more like an essay, first published at Nerve and available here, about serial killers and serial sex and turtles. I've probably made it sound more interesting than it is; it is, in fact, my least favorite.

Yet despite my hesitancies regarding the collection as a whole, Gaitskill's writing shines in the small moments. Sentence after sentence in some these stories glows with small phrases that are as hard and beautiful as diamonds. Such writing is hard to come by, and for that, she's still got me looking forward to picking up her next collection.

On "Secretary" by Mary Gaitskill (6060 words) *****

Some of you may be familiar with the movie Secretary, which came out about five years ago. That film is an erotic love story involving S&M. The brainchild for the film, however, was Gaitskill's story of the same name, but the direction that the two works take is decidedly different. The movie is a romance. The story is goes in the direction we would more likely expect--a certain disgust with the actions of the boss. What makes it compelling, however, is the main character who, as in the movie, seems turned on by her boss's actions. But here it isn't simplified. Here, the girl's interest is offset by her own uncertain feelings about herself and her life, her own lack of confidence. The ending, as one might expect, is very different from the movie. Gaitskill's work revels in these awkward situations created by our own untoward desires. Not surprisingly, this story is in a collection called Bad Behavior. Read the story here at Nerve.