Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill

I am, admittedly, an easy crier, but I do not appreciate an undeserved cry. Mary Gaitskill has earned this one. Don’t Cry is a collection of short stories that reveals how it was built, laying open skin to show strong and tender muscles. It’s not a flashy book; its strength is slow and careful.

Gaitskill begins with the unremarkable “College Town, 1980,” about a frumpy student stuck in Ann Arbor. “Everyone wanted to be depressed,” Gaitskill writes. “But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that’s what had proved to be too much for Dolores.” Here, Gaitskill introduces what will become a signature element of the book: the ugliness of disappointment and the potential grace in accepting it.

Another signature element: kink. Lots of it. Gaitskill wraps everything in slippery, uneasy, sometimes lovely sexuality. “College Town” is followed by “Folk Song” a brief essay-style story about a woman who intends to have sex with one thousand men in a row. That may sound gimmicky, as may “Mirror Ball,” in which a boy discovers that he has been stealing the souls of girls he sleeps with—they hang around his bedroom, restless and muttering. But Gaitskill tells her stories with earnest seriousness, and with such sympathy and specificity, that her characters give power to any fanciful plot choices.

She finds words for details of relationships that often go unnamed and unexplored. In “The Agonized Face,” she writes of an unexpectedly honest speech by an celebrity-feminist author: “We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us—a touch that was emotionally erotic.”

In “The Little Boy” and “The Arms and Legs of the Lake,” Gaitskill approaches the Iraq War with delicacy and insight. She writes, of a veteran, “When his daughter was a little girl, sometimes she would ask him to tell her a war story, her eyes soft and shining with trust, wanting to hear about men killing one another.” And later: “Alone in the field or in the woods, looking for his dog, was when he could feel what had happened in Iraq and stand it.” Gaitskill takes nothing for granted, and no impulse is simple. She uses her words as tools for investigation. A woman touches her husband and feels him “withdraw from her without moving.” The son of a woman with cancer, jealous of his brother, notes that “It wasn’t what Caleb said that made her laugh; it was something in his voice that, without his trying, touched her somewhere that Joseph couldn’t reach.”

The devastating final story, “Don’t Cry,” follows a recent widow as she accompanies her friend to Ethiopia to adopt a child. Her grief merges with the collective grief of a nation, but her experience is not about transcendence or even healing; it is about naming the specifics of our grievances when it seems that nothing else can help. The story was previously published in the New Yorker, and I can’t imagine it having the same emotional power without the weight of this collection behind it. No single line in Gaitskill’s collection can explain the steady, straining precision of the stories as a whole. They support one another, a true body of work. Gaitskill takes her time, and it is certainly time well spent.

Reviewed by Katelyn Eichwald

Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon Books, 2009
Cloth, 240 pp, $23.95.
ISBN-10: 0375424199