In the saddle
Mary Gaitskill first became known in the 1980s for her defiantly honest and perverse short stories, where, in charged sentences, she depicted the shifting power balances of damaging relationships and the connection between intimacy and pain. Her new novel, “The Mare,” though quite different in subject matter and style, also explores vulnerability and the dangers of transgressive connections.
In a 2009 essay in Granta, “Lost Cat,” Gaitskill wove together her wild grief after the disappearance of her beloved rescued cat, her painful family history and her multiyear entanglement with Caesar — a Dominican boy she and her husband hosted through the Fresh Air Fund — and Caesar’s older sister, Natalia. The essay chronicled the violence of the children’s home life and Gaitskill’s attempts to help Natalia by introducing her to horseback riding and tutoring her through her learning difficulties. Gaitskill examined the inherent, problematic conundrums of the Fresh Air Fund as well as her own hungers and frustrations. Written in an elliptical, self-punishing / self-justifying, sophisticated prose — full of rich, psychologically layered exposition — the unsettling essay seemed to be told in the exact voice, at exactly the right length, for this material.
And yet, in “The Mare,” Gaitskill returns to the same territory in fiction, exploring animal and human connections, privilege and prejudice, the painful ways that personal need can get mixed up in the desire to help, and how the impulse to mother/save/ take away someone else’s children can lead into highly complex territory for everyone involved. She combines this explosive material with elements from Enid Bagnold’s 1935 novel about a girl and her horse, “National Velvet.”
In “The Mare,” Ginger, a 47-year-old artist who has lost her sense of connection to her art, and her husband, Paul, whom she met in AA, decide to practice for a possible adoption by hosting a child sponsored by the Fresh Air Fund. They are matched with Velvet Vargas, an 11year-old Dominican girl from an emotionally and sometimes physically violent home. The girl’s mother, referred to as Mrs. Vargas in the novel, seems to love Velvet’s difficult younger brother, Dante, while behaving harshly toward Velvet.
More than 400 pages long, the novel rotates between various points of view in very short chapters — from a few pages to a few lines. These read like letters from the characters, each offering his or her perspective on the novel’s most recent events. Most of these entries come from Ginger and Velvet, with some additions from Paul, Mrs. Vargas and a few others. Ginger takes Velvet to a riding stable, where Velvet falls for a dangerous mare, uncomfortably mirroring Ginger’s over-attachment to Velvet. As all these relationships progress, Velvet gets in trouble at the stable and at school, and Ginger and Paul’s secrets and betrayals echo those in Velvet’s own family and precocious sex life.
Ginger describes Velvet in many ways, including as “the girl from the culture I know nothing about, but who I’m messing with anyway.” Velvet’s voice varies from extremely innocent to incredibly acute, often flat as she struggles to articulate her ideas, sometimes poetically lyrical. Though she occasionally thinks about Ginger and her motives, she thinks much more about her schoolmates, the boy who’s using her, her mother’s injustice and love, and her horse, whose emotions and vulnerabilities she can read — as she feels she can read all the horses: “She kicked harder, even more hating, and also something else, something I could feel coming out from my own body, coming hard. I CAN’T GET OUT I CAN’T GET OUT LET ME OUT I NEED TO GET OUT I CAN’T GET OUT. The other horses made noises: we hear.”
A book that reimagines “National Velvet” has different challenges than one that reworks a Shakespearean play, for example, and this may be responsible for Gaitskill’s atypically hopeful narrative arc, which presses toward sweetness in its poetic, uplifting ending. Everything comes together in classic fashion when the horse and the girl save each other, transforming all the characters in the process.
In “The Mare,” Gaitskill engages, sometimes alarmingly, in multiple ambivalent, self-conscious acts of appropriation, apparently drawing on many of the family dynamics she described in the essay. The novel both tackles and embodies this appropriation, anxiously considering race and class privilege, emotional neediness and the hunger to be a savior. In the novel, unlike the essay, the ending redeems the characters and so justifies all their choices and actions.