Mary Gaitskill’s prose is the literary equivalent of a Robert Mapplethorpe nude: it’s full frontal sexuality, but it’s also deeply human. Her turns of phrase are both poetic and raw; she penetrates her characters’ psyches — lays bare their feelings, their fears, their kinks — like no other writer.
In her most recent collection of short stories, Don’t Cry, now out in paperback, memory converges with present, fantasy collides with reality, and sparse prose reveals deep craft. The stories are about love, loss, death, and art. And sure, there’s lots of sex here, too, but it’s Gaitskill’s unmatched ability to render human nature so precisely that makes this book so haunting. Her writing is not for prudes, but those who follow her into the dark places are rewarded with pure pleasure. Gaitskill recently spoke to us about Dick Cheney, vampires, and other frightening specters of modern life.
There has been a great deal of hand wringing over Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to publish his father’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura. Dmitri recognizes this by dedicating the book to “all the worldwide contributors of opinion, comment, and advice, of whatever its stripe, who imagined that their views, sometimes deftly expressed, might somehow change mine.” Poppa Vladimir made it perfectly clear to his wife that he wanted her to burn the manuscript if he died before finishing it, but she wavered and then died herself. The decision fell to Dmitri, who explains in the introduction that he feels that his father did not really want him to burn it. The obvious retort here is that he did want that, and said as much to his wife, explicitly. But dead men make no complaints, and Dmitri and Knopf have seen fit to publish a beautiful book from the messy little cards.
