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.