Reader pulled along on critical journeys
The first piece in Mary Gaitskill’s searing “Somebody With a Little Hammer” lets you know that the essay collection isn’t the kind that will allow you to curl up for a comfortable read.
The essay centers on the Book of Revelation — and it’s a doozy.
Titled “A Lot of Exploding Heads,” it isn’t so much about Revelation — that “most cinematic and surreal part of the Bible” — as it is about the way her mind collides with it.
When the noted author writes about any book, she makes the process a fullon contact sport, with the boundaries between her and the book so fluid that they are barely there.
You wouldn’t want to be her — she’s so sensitive as to seem almost flayed, every ■ nerve ending exposed to whatever she encounters — but immersing yourself in her world for a page or three has the bracing aliveness of throwing yourself into almost-freezing water.
In that first essay, her approach means you’re with her, not just reading but dreaming of “hooded monks carrying huge, grim crosses in processions meant to end in someone’s death by fire, drowning, or quartering”; becoming (temporarily) a born-again Christian at 21; and then, 20 years later, rereading the book and finding it “a terrible abstract of how we violate ourselves and others and thus bring down endless suffering on Earth.”
Even the slightest of these essays are carefully crafted journeys through the reading experience.
Gaitskill is normally a generous critic, with her best pieces focusing on books that move her. It would be hard to read her essays about “Bleak House” and “Peter Pan” and not want to visit, or revisit, those books.
A few times, she gets snarky — and then the personal approach doesn’t serve her so well. She doesn’t like “Gone Girl,” for example, but her essay veers away from the book into a discussion of why the virtual world is inferior to the physical, with an aside that the book’s author can sound “exactly like” its (nasty) heroine.
Even more compelling than the essays are two slices of memoir.
“The Bridge” flows around an incident when she suffered a concussion on a boat ride in St. Petersburg, Russia, swirling through vividly surreal memories of the trip and of her earlier life. The unbearably poignant “Lost Cat” starts with its title subject but broadens out to track years of her fraught relationship with two poor children.
These pieces, arranged in chronological order, span 20 years. What’s surprising isn’t how Gaitskill’s way of seeing and writing changes but how her essential concerns deepen and widen.