Everything looks like a nail
Somebody With a Little Hammer: Essays By Mary Gaitskill Pantheon 288 pp; $ 34.95
Mary Gaitskill’s first book of nonfiction — a cool and formidable collection of essays, reviews and other matter — takes its title from a sentence in Anton Chekhov’s short story Gooseberries.
“At the door of every contented, happy man,” Chekhov wrote, “somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.”
In her novels and short stories, Gaitskill has often been that somebody. Her fiction taps and cracks the veneer of life. She displays viscera, moral and otherwise.
About sex she is an especially distinctive writer. She catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called “the dirt within,” as well as any writer we have. Once you’ve read her, her little hammer continues to tap in your head.
Gaitskill has not written a memoir and may never do so. A few of the personal essays here may be as close as she wants us to get. She’s led a life that has often put her at a distance from Chekhov’s “contented, happy” person.
She dropped out of high school and left home at 16. She sold cheap jewelry on the streets of Toronto. She worked as a stripper. She attended community college. She was date- raped and later, in Detroit, in her words, “raped for real.”
About that second rape, she writes: “The terror was acute, but after it was over, it actually affected me less than many other mundane instances of emotional brutality I’ve suffered or seen other people suffer. Frankly, I’ve been scarred more by experiences I had on the playground in elementary school.”
Gaitskill is the second writer I’ve read in the past year ( the other was Jenny Diski, in her memoir In Gratitude) to say about rape something I hadn’t before heard and would not have expected: that it was not a defining event in her life.
There are essays in Somebody With a Little Hammer about sex and gender, about music ( Talking Heads, Bjork, Celine Dion), about writers (Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholson Baker), about travel and about politics.
For the French newspaper Libération, she kept a diary during the 2008 presidential election. The portions of it printed here make you wish Gaitskill commented on politics vastly more often.
“When I saw Sarah Palin speak at the Republican National Convention,” she writes, “the hair on the back of my neck stood up.” She’s looking, she realizes, at a sadist.
“By ‘ sadist’ I don’t mean a costume- wearing fetishist, and if I did I wouldn’t be as appalled,” she writes. “I mean something more basic, a person whose driving motive in life is to dominate, control and inflict pain.”
Elsewhere s he writes about reviewing, words every critic should tattoo on his or her knuckles: “To overpraise is a subtle form of disrespect — and everybody knows it.”
I will overpraise and complain at the same time by noting that Gaitskill’s best and most widely anthologized essay, about the twisted sexual allure of Axl Rose (“his rapt, mean little face, the whole turgor of his body, suggests a descent into a pit of gorgeous, carnal grossness”), is omitted from this volume. This may be because it was written in 1992, before Rose had been sued for sexual abuse. The essay is ferocious, as potent as anything I’ve read about the appeal of bad boys. I wish she’d printed it and added a rapt, mean little postscript.
It was Samuel Johnson who said, wrongly but amusingly, that no one except a blockhead writes for any reason but money. I held Johnson’s aperçu in mind while reading Somebody With a Little Hammer. So many of its essays appeared in small journals that I began to fear Gaitskill had never seen a check with a comma in it — for her nonfiction.
“I am a person who often chooses pain,” Gaitskill writes in one essay here. Yet an observer can’t help noticing that she has begun, for the first time, to smile in her dust jacket photographs.
Is American literature’s dark swan, its Odile, mellowing? The news these essays bring is, I am happy to say, not at all. She continues to wield a remorseless little hammer.