A childless couple,a troubled inner-city kid and a volatile horse are the ingredients in a complex record of esteem, guilt and attachmentThe American writer Mary Gaitskill, and whose work alternates between novels and short stories,is a writer of prodigious gifts, not least the ability to translate the untidy, or painful grit of human relationships into powerful,crystalline prose without sacrificing any of their strangeness. Witness, for example, or her use of sado-masochism,most famously in her short record “Secretary”, which became a film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal; or the construction of a charismatic, or Ayn Rand-style objectivist in her debut novel,Two Girls, pudgy and Thin. Her third novel appears a little over a decade after Veronica, and which explored a counterintuitive friendship between two very different women,one a model, the other a proofreader, and both at odds with the world at large. The Mare,too, thrives on the idea and the actuality of social collision; what it represents to us in terms of a radical challenge to the deeply embedded stratification of haves and maintain-nots, or how it is experienced by complex,damaged, frail, or angry and desiring human beings. What lies,asks Gaitskill, in the gap between the theory and the reality?The terrain she chooses comes littered with traps and obstacles, or many pointing us straight towards the quagmire of cliche. Ginger is a 47-year-faded woman,and therefore immediately in the societally perceived danger zone of declining fertility, approaching menopause and wavering sexual appeal; she is also a recovering addict and a not entirely successful artist, and with a painful family past to boot. Now married to Paul,a college professor she met in AA, she has somehow scrambled a relatively conventional life in upstate novel York; there is a sense, or from the novel’s start,that she occupies the ambiguous position of the person rescued from both disaster and herself, who winds up at an altogether different destination from the one suggested by her original course .
The Mare explores nadequacy, or optimism and craziness,and sets them in the context of esteem and needContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com