Glimmers of the hopeless
Preteen Elizabeth Taylor became a star in 1944’s National Velvet. She played Velvet Brown, a feisty girl leading a discredited horse to victory. Mary Gaitskill revisits that upbeat tale in The Mare, a masterful, utterly absorbing and harrowing account that’s about mères (mothers) as much as horse-riding.
Besides changing the location, she saddens the tone immensely, portraying American culture as wounded by differences and suspicions. A mosaic of multicultural fragments in Gaitskill’s telling, the nation’s downtrodden poor are hostile to the relatively affluent, who in turn ignore or fear the underclass; white, brown and black display fierce tribal loyalties; angry men vie for power while women compete for men; and once together, men and women become strife-ridden disasters.
Though Gaitskill opts for six narrators across nearly 280 short chapters, she reserves the majority for the voices of a girl with staggeringly few opportunities and a middle-aged woman whose earnest desire to mother and save the disadvantaged youth are hampered by self-doubts and peer judgments.
At 11, Velvet Vargas has learned to fend for herself. Dead broke, her Dominican single mother expresses love via insults and slaps.
Fleeing a “life being sloppily given over to alcohol and drugs,” Ginger has married Paul, a professor, and moved upstate. Stalled at reviving her artistry, she’s floundering with a domesticity whose surface disguises turbulence and a family history causing lingering pain.
Never sentimental, Gaitskill creates figures capable and yet handicapped by circumstance; each outburst, rash decision and setback becomes agonizing to witness. Brett Josef Grubisic lives in Vancouver and teaches at UBC. His third novel, From Up River, and For One Night Only, will be published next spring.