Everything looks like a nail

control and inflict pain.”

Gaitskill is no stranger to writing about sadism and masochism. One of her short stories became the movie Secretary, in which James Spader spanks and sexually dominates a submissive Maggie Gyllenhaal.

She was displeased with that movie, she writes. It was breezy and upbeat, absent of darker shading. The take-away, she writes, “is that S/M is not only painless; it’s therapeutic: It has made both characters more confident, better-looking, happier, freer, and self-actualized. Best of all, it has led them straight to marriage!”

She notes, “This insistence on the positive may seem compassionate, but it rarely is, for it cannot tolerate anything that is not happy and winning.”

Elsewhere she writes, in a similar vein, 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.

Yes, one piece appeared in Harper’s, another in Elle, another in The New York Times Book Review. But more appeared in places like Asymptote Journal, Stone Canoe, Post Road and SF360.org. There’s an appealing sense that she composed these essays because she wanted to, not because a payday was on offer.

“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.

What’s more, her most recent novel, The Mare (2015), was a tear-jerker at times, with an upbeat ending. 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. Author Mary Gaitskill led a life that has often put her at a distance from Chekhov’s “contented, happy” person.