Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill

I have just finished reading Because They Wanted To, by Mary Gaitskill. It is a collection of short stories. I got it because last year I read her story collection Bad Behavior, which instantly rose to the top of my charts, with a bullet. She’s a writer I feel reverent about.

I am very tired right now, so perhaps this will help me keep my commentary, well, comment-sized. I really just wanted to say a few things.

Overall, I’m not sure that this collection resonated with me as consistently as Bad Behavior. But it had a couple of points at least as bright as anything in the earlier book. “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” is a masterpiece of a story, and “Blanket” really did it for me, too. They both have understated big finishes.

I’ve found myself reading these stories with an eye to what makes Gaitskill’s stories work as stories.

One thought: a couple of them have surprise endings, in that we’re led to expect a conclusion we feel one way about, and get something else instead. In Bad Behavior, there’s a story that hinges around a main character who keeps making choices that the reader is led to see as bad—she’s casually allowing herself to be taken advantage of by a cruel and sadistic man—and the drama of the story is that the writer puts the reader into the main character’s mind as she makes her decisions, coming agonizingly close to making the choices we’d want her to, and then sort of naively throwing herself into the fire again. We want to shake her by the shoulders and tell her what to do, but of course we can’t. By the end of the story, the character seems on the brink of making a powerful decision that will keep her safe, but then, at the very last minute, she decides the other way. She’s walking into something awful and she doesn’t see it but we do. The feeling of let-down is devastating. In this collection, “Blanket” works in a related but opposite way. We’re led to expect a bitterly disappointing conclusion, and are rewarded instead at the last minute with a happy one. Characters who didn’t seem equipped to be able to be close to each other suddenly find it in themselves to be. No promises that things stay good, but there’s one divine moment where the characters exceed our expectations of what they were capable of, and they’re happy, and we’re desperately happy for them.

Mary Gaitskill’s short stories are about tough people and tough situations: emotional pain, sexual difficulty, the sadistic and masochistic threads in our personalities. One thing that I really like about them, though, is that there’s something in many of them that defies the maudlin expectations of her high-dramatic themes. How to put this? Some of Gaitskill’s characters are people who seem like they ought to be a complete mess, but the point of the story is, to me, that these people either are or are going to be all right. Or could be all right. Or as all right as anyone else. This is what I took away from the title story, “Because They Wanted To,” whose main character is a 16-year-old runaway who’s had some bad experiences but seems curiously untouched by them. The story ends with her drifting; I came off the ending curious about her future, somewhat worried, but equally able to believe that she might drift on forever, basically untroubled—or that she might even grow up someday in a meaningful sense.

A similar but different feeling from the last section of the book, a collection of four linked stories related in the first person. The narrator is a single poetry teacher in her late thirties who starts the story by telling the clerk in her neighborhood deli, “I have deep longings that will never be satisfied.” In what follows, the narrator is haunted by the memory of an abusive love affair. She has two sexual encounters and a tentative romantic relationship that she picks apart in great detail, uncovering sparks of connection that never quite overpower a deeper matrix of alienation. Her aloneness is horrible, but also dignified and proud. By the time the last story ends, I feel respect for this resigned, yet highly curious and analytical person. She bears her pain. She has a weird kind of integrity, and she has herself and her need to see and describe the world around her. I'd be curious to know whether other people took away similar interpretations of these stories, but here's my tentative conclusion: I like the cool eye of okay-ness glimpsed in the midst of Situations We Understand as Being Bad. I think like it a lot.

Two Can Play at this Quote Game

Here's something from Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To that made me reach for my pen. It's in the story "Orchid."

[The girls] would look at Patrick as if calmly measuring the distance between him and them, as if they knew that his little area of private space was closed to them, but that was all right because they had their own little area they were plannng to go back to once they got what they came for--although of course it often didn't work out that way.

Longer remarks on this book tomorrow.

The Recognitions, p. 762

I've had this quotation sitting on my computer's desktop for the nearly three years since I read p. 762 of William Gaddis's The Recognitions (Penguin Classics edition). While the sentiment is itself staggering, when coupled with his quietly outlandish phrasing - "certain surviving kings," "in spite of these insults" - it devastates.

"Have you ever thought about this, that right now this instant every one of them is somewhere being real? The Pope and the President and also certain surviving kings, the people whose secrets we know and the ones of whom we know no more than the newspaper confides, all the people you have met and all the people you will meet, and all you have never met and will never meet, all of them they are somewhere now right now this instant being real. Even when you are not talking about them, not thinking about them perhaps not even remembering them in spite of these insults they are somewhere being real. As though they did not care! At the very same instant they are being real right now. It is too much to comprehend that, still they dare it, but it is too much."
- William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Book Binge!

I’ve recently come into some free time, and resolved to start writing more. In anticipation of these events, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I went on a book binge.

Having studied English in college and after, I’ve read a pretty decent array of classic fiction, but partly because I was so busy with the old and canonical, aside from the year I subscribed to The New Yorker and read the short story every week on the treadmill at the gym, I haven’t kept up very well on newer fare.

Therefore, I’ve decided to try to educate myself about recent fiction. I went on Ask Metafilter and asked people to recommend to me books written in the last ten years or so, in a more or less realist style, by more or less youngish authors, more or less about the experience of being a youngish person in the present day. The MeFites gave me many suggestions, and then I went crazy on some Powells and some Abebooks.com, and picked up a few more things that hadn’t been on their lists (and maybe don’t even fit with my criteria).

I’ve just set up my shelves, and this is what I’ve got now that the dust has settled:

Aimee Bender – The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Douglas Coupland – Microserfs
Amanda Davis – Wonder When You’ll Miss Me
Joshua Ferris – Then We Came to the End
Mary Gaitskill – Veronica
Mary Gaitskill – Because They Wanted To
Myla Goldberg – Wickett’s Remedy
Myla Goldberg – Time’s Magpie
A.M. Homes – The Safety of Objects
Miranda July – No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ken Kalfus – Thirst
Matthew Klam – Sam the Cat and Other Stories
Jonathan Lethem – The Fortress of Solitude
Tao Lin – Bed
Tao Lin – Eeeee Eee Eeee
Kelly Link – Magic For Beginners
Sam Lipsyte – The Subject Steve
David Mazzotta – Business As Usual
Claire Messud – The Emperor’s Children
Lorrie Moore – Like Life
Julie Orringer – How To Breathe Underwater
Gail Parent – Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York
Tom Perrotta – Joe College
Marisha Pessl – Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Julia Slavin – The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club

Clearly I have my late winter and spring cut out for me!

I also have some other books lying around, which are not part of the project but which I’d like to read anyway:

Jacques Barzun – On Writing and Publishing
Raymond Chandler – The Long Goodbye
Mark Epstein – Thoughts Without A Thinker
Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July – Learning to Love You More
Soren Kierkegaard – The Sickness Unto Death
Eric G. Wilson – Against Happiness
Paramahansa Yogananda – Autobiography of a Yogi

Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, by Dan Kennedy

So I'm going to pick up where Anna left off with that last review:

"I wanted her to extrapolate the fates of similarly flailing brainy and talented NYC 30-pushers (a group to which I squarely belong) from her own."

That's a nice place to start because while Anna was finishing Julie and Julia, I was rounding the corner of another book purportedly pertinent to the talented NYC 30-pushing set: Rock On, by Dan Kennedy.

Rock On looked like a novel to me at first when I picked it out of the book stack at work. I picked it out because I'm interested in how people write about work: we spend so much of our lives working for money, doing all the activities and feeling all the feelings that we lump under the word "work," and yet most books and movies gently sidestep this territory. Anyway, Rock On turned out to be a memoir, not a novel, but it's still about working a job so, basically, this paragraph is a poorly constructed excuse for me to be able to say that one thing about how there aren't a lot of books about work.

Moving on. Sometime during the early mid '00s, Dan Kennedy, then in his mid-thirties, after some years spent pulling his way up a few rungs of the New York City advertising-writer/P.R.-guy ladder, landed a job at big, fancy Atlantic Records: a dream come true for a lifelong rock 'n' roll afficionado. The job was in the marketing department, or something. Writing publicity campaigns, or something like that. The vagueness of his job description is part of the book's ongoing joke.

Rock On is a really quick read, at just a hair over 200 pages. The prose is fast, furious, and very, very funny. Kennedy writes as a normal-guy rock fan, addressing the reader as another normal-guy or -gal rock fan; as far as narrative structure goes, the book mostly feels like a guided tour that could be titled "The Rock and Roll Business These Days Sure Is Fraught With Pathetic Ironies." Most of the tour takes place inside Atlantic Records' sprawling, mythically corporate-swank offices on Rockefeller Center. We've got desks that can be called real estate, stereo systems that cost more than a year at a private college, sinecured executives with seven-figure salaries, and legions of assistants and 'foot soldiers' who actually get things done.

Yes, this book is a picture of corporate excess and one smart and talented youngish man's reaction to it. Kennedy makes himself into an interesting character, a true blue rock fan who's sometimes appalled by the status-obsessed, conformist, overpaid, and strangely meek culture he finds at Atlantic, and other times wishing only to be more of a success within it. Bouncing back and forth between attraction and revulsion for his surroundings, he makes us laugh at his overindulgence in Prada sweaters and expensive picture frames and whatever else he thinks it's going to take for him to 'fit in,' without ever completely disavowing those desires.

Rock On is about the twilight of a particular age of excess in the record industry. It's about the very strange bedfellows that rock 'n' roll and the modern corporation make. And, in being about the awkward meeting point between rock's anarchy and the corporation's also egotistical but generally at least supposedly more pragmatic concerns, it's about growing up: that moment where youthful idealism turns a corner and runs smack into a want, a real want, for financial security and Prada sweaters and, you know, a place in the world.

I think Dan Kennedy's more concerned with being funny and making great observations (and he is a first-rate observationist, capturing perfectly the little details of social interactions and the little ways they can go wrong; it's not hard to imagine that he is a very good advertising writer) than he is with crafting bigger points about being a smart, talented person trying to build a career in New York. He tells teenagers to keep their dreams alive while also painting a picture of a world in which moments of "and this is what I got into this business for in the first place!" satisfaction are few and far between. If that's a problem, he lets it hang in the air.

Maybe I should leave it there and not force my own preference for everything to have a 'point' on it, but well, here are just a few thoughts that pop out of my mind, about what Rock On might say for itself if it were forced to state its thesis.

(1) Maybe nothing you could do for a living is as pure as you thought rock and roll was when you were twelve or fourteen years old. (Or, on the other hand, maybe there's something peculiarly soul-deadened about a large corporation, and if you think it's going to bother you you should try not to work in one.)

(2) No matter how many Prada sweaters you have, someone else in the world or probably even in your company will have a lot more of everything else than you do.

(3) Having a sense of humor helps greatly with items (1) and (2).

Julie & Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

Food memoirs are my personal equivalent to Candace Bushnell or Danielle Steel: trashy and forgettable, generally read in one sitting. Beach reads, if I ever went to the beach. But unlike, say, (insane professional chef) Anthony Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential or (wealthy world traveler) Bill Buford of Heat, the Julie Powell who narrates Julie & Julia and I have a lot in common: we’re both nearing 30, living in NYC’s outer boroughs (though my apartment has fewer slapstick-hilarious plumbing issues), in love with men whose unending support and patience sometimes bewilders us, and trying to figure out what to do with our lives.

And while Powell and I have both gravitated towards food as both comfort and solution, our approaches couldn’t be more different. But I admire Powell because, even though she calls being vegetarian “stupid,” she acknowledges that honest, homemade, laborious food is worth the effort – even if her ingredients tend toward lardons and chicken livers, while I prefer e.g. olive oil and Swiss chard. And as a skinny girl who nevertheless thrills inwardly to any weight loss, I especially admire that in her weird, frenzied adoption of her “project” – to cook (and eat) every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in a single year – Powell remains undaunted by gaining twenty pounds of “butterweight.”

But for all her lighting-out-for-the-territory bravado, Powell’s writing style is self-defeating; while I want to read Julie & Julia as the coming-of-age narrative it clearly longs to be, she never wavers from her dashed-off, blog-cultivated prose, which, while engaging and often hilarious, undermines her story’s potential gravity. This passage, responding to a turning point in Powell's self-discovery, illustrates her overly casual tone - appropriate for anecdotes, but disappointing when things get weighty:

Oh, and I also know that when you’ve gotten a night of sleep, no matter how tear-stained, and then some bolstering from people who love you – or “love” you, or whatever – even if they’re people you’ve never met, sometimes the end of the world doesn’t seem like that anymore. Like the end, I mean.

Perhaps Powell’s project is too zany to be treated otherwise, but – and I have maybe never said this about anyone ever – I found myself wishing she’d take herself more seriously. I wanted moralizing and universalizing; I wanted her to extrapolate the fates of similarly flailing brainy and talented NYC 30-pushers (a group to which I squarely belong) from her own. For all her espoused carnivorism, Powell's story wasn't meaty enough for this vegetarian.

Anna's list of 30 most significant books

Katherine and I discussed whether to include annotations in these lists. In the interest of brevity and time, we decided against it, which I initially thought would be easier. But for me, the lack of explanation or qualification made each inclusion more alarming: did I really take more from Passman's no-nonsense workman's guide to the music industry more than, say, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man? Well, yes. And without the cushioning of context and qualification ("You see, I work in the music industry..."), such an admission feels stark and unnerving. This list is imperfect - I'm sure I have missed a few things - but it is honest.

Apuleius – The Golden Ass
Austen, Jane – Pride & Prejudice
Azerrad, Michael – Our Band Could Be Your Life
Bakan, Joel – The Corporation
Bangs, Lester – Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (collected criticism)
Catullus – Poems
Cortazar, Julio – Hopscotch
De Beauvoir, Simone – Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Eagleton, Terry – Literary Theory
French, Marilyn – The Women’s Room
Gandhi – Autobiography
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Juster, Norton – The Phantom Tollbooth
Kafka, Franz – The Trial
Kaptchuk, Ted J. – The Web That Has No Weaver
Longus – Daphnis & Chloe
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marcus, Greil – Lipstick Traces
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – 100 Years Of Solitude
Nestle, Marion – What To Eat
Passman, Donald - All You Need To Know About The Music Business
Proust, Marcel – In Search Of Lost Time
Salinger, J.D. – Raise High The Roof-Beam, Carpenters
Syme, Ronald – The Roman Revolution
Tolstoy, Leo – War & Peace
Wallace, David Foster – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Wolf, Naomi – The Beauty Myth
Woolf, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway
Yogananda, Paramahansa – Autobiography of a Yogi