Bad Behavior: Stories

Product Information

I found this book on a list of the ten sexiest books of all time, and I should have known as soon as I saw Tropic of Cancer that the author was confusing "sexy" with "containing sex", but this contains the story that spawned the movie "Secretary"! Which I don't know if you've seen that but it's sexy. Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the past, she has described, with clarity and vision, the places in life where we sometimes get painfully caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release. Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012, 2020), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998, 2008). Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior (1988) and Veronica (2005), which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. I shouldn't be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. for a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her.” Again, the TV announced, “Now we're this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!” Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one.

Mary Gaitskill’s Art of Loneliness | The Nation Mary Gaitskill’s Art of Loneliness | The Nation

Her prose has a sharp edge that presses up against your throat, daring you to read on – which you will. There’s a certain mercilessness that comes with these stories, abandonment of insecurities and depicting women with masochistic tendencies. Mary Gaitskill is edgy, unsentimental, dangerously sharp. In this collection she writes about people who are in the dregs - lonely and reaching out for connection. She writes about people having affairs, people into S&M, prostitutes (lots of those), drug users, struggling artists. She gives voice to those on the fringe, their desperation laced with extra darkness. At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.”For Gaitskill, the solutions to loneliness and the cruelty it so often prompts are honesty, vulnerability, and recognition; this is the underlying moral vision that courses through her fiction. Gaitskill may be a secular writer, but there is something almost religious in the way she depicts human frailty. It’s common—indeed, inevitable—and cannot be barred or banned or legislated away; it can only be viewed, unblinkingly. And sometimes, after enough thought and time, forgiven. 28

Bad Behavior - Mary Gaitskill - Google Books Bad Behavior - Mary Gaitskill - Google Books

Art is only good at the moment it’s done. After that it’s dead. It’s just so much dead shit. Artists are like people trying to hoard their shit.” And she has this way of saying things in an unconventional way, but makes perfect sense to me. Like this: That knife-edge turn of perspective! That matter-of-fact dismembering! It’s so good. It’s so deft. I love it. Not to mention all of the work that the single line of the female character’s imagination is doing. Not a word is wasted here.I don’t agree with that,” Gaitskill said, a statement that many contemporary feminists might find not just controversial, but potentially dangerous. “If you don’t even try to tell the man ‘No’, whether he personally asks or not, I don’t know how you can then say ‘I was raped’.” She defended this view by referencing the context in which she was raised: “Men would try to get women to have sex with them. That’s what they were expected to do. If you put up no resistance, if you didn’t struggle or say anything, I don’t think you could expect a man in that context to really know, ‘No, she doesn’t want this’.” This, she suggested, absolves them of blame, but today any man who has been to college, where consent workshops are the norm, would have been taught “to get consent – but nobody said that then”. I think it’s less hard on me because of my age. It would be worse if I were 40 years old and this was happening. At my age, I expect to be a little bit out of the mainstream. If I don’t ever teach again, that’s fine. But if I were 40 and felt like I might never teach again, that would be really frightening. With Gaitskill, you scarcely get or sometimes even expect popular opinions, regardless of whether she is riffing on Chekhov or the Clintons. She is seldom persuaded by groupthink, be it the “psychological uniformity of experience” that she decries in both “rape-crisis” American feminists and their critics in the mid-90s, or years later, the “hive-mind” that she feels is at work in the bestselling novel Gone Girl: “There is nothing here but ‘that guy’ or ‘that girl’, and that means nothing, period.” She defends John Updike’s right to be narcissistic, Norman Mailer’s impulse to be a “kook”. I mean, I fight my middle age at every turn. But some days you're just cranky about things - younger writers, younger people. Younger subjects. Mary Gaitskill can bring out the crank in anyone. Or maybe just anyone my age. She is a terrific writer, and an adept wordsmith. And I sorta hated this book, and knew I should like it more.