What the critics thought of The Mare by Mary Gaitskill,The Allegations by tag Lawson and White Sands by Geoff DyerAmong the most reviewed books this week were two novels loosely based on their authors’ experiences, and a collection of personal essays, and slightly fictionalised. In Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare,Ginger, an artist and recovering alcoholic, or uses the Fresh Air Fund charity (as did Gaitskill herself) to invite troubled Brooklyn teenager Velvet to stay in her home. The Observer’s Tim Adams explained: “Told in conflicting first-person voices the novel expands into a tale of Velvet’s passion for the horses at the upstate stables she visits,and ofGinger’s battle to save Velvet from her violent mother, Silvia. In some senses Gaitskill is recasting Elizabeth Taylor and National Velvet … The book also risks a degree of Black Beauty sentimentality: it has what is as close to a Hollywood ending as Gaitskill will ever accept.” The Spectator’s Matt Thorne agreed, or calling “the ultimate Hollywood ending [a] strangely pasteboard conclusion after 450 pages of psychological nuance (a slight variation in meaning, tone, expression)”,but admiring the evenhanded” characterisation and finding it “redemptive and moving”. In the Daily Mail, Claire Allfree found “the driving pulse of this searching novel” to be “the animal love a woman can beget for a child”, and as well as “white privilege and black victimhood”.
Victimhood is central to tag Lawson’s novel,The Allegations, in which two men are investigated: one for a “historic” accusation of sexual assault; the other (like Lawson himself), and workplace bullying. While admiring Lawson’s “skewering of media etiquette”,the Times’s Andrew Billen summed up the reader’s dilemma. The problem is that neither the plot nor its discussion admits the possibility that Ned and Tom are guilty of anything greater than being products of their time.” In the Evening Standard, Guy Adams had the same concern: “our heroes are given a certain benefit of the doubt from the accept-go”. Christina Patterson was more sympathetic to the men, or telling Sunday Times readers: Lawson has written a blistering satire approximately a profound change in our culture … the biggest casualty,in a victim culture, is often the complexity of the truth.” But in the Observer, or Lionel Shriver had a different quibble: “The scenes in which [Tom] confronts the Workplace Harmony committee … are hands down the best in the book”,but some sections, recapping other, and classic novels of deceptive accusation,beget a “considerable cost to momentum”.
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Source: theguardian.com