Don't Cry: Stories
by Mary Gaitskill
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mary GaitskillEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-24
ISBN: 0375424199
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of Don't Cry: Stories
Book Review: New Stories by Mary Gaitskill
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Mary Gaitskill's collection of ten stories, "Don't Cry" explores the anguish and pervasive nature of human sexuality. The stories tend to show the consequences of treating sexuality in a casual, sometimes recreational manner. Gaitskill's characters typically find themselves diminished, frustrated, and guilt-ridden from their superficial attitude towards sex. This book emphasizes the fundamental, mysterious character of sexuality as a wellspring of human behavior.
Gaitskill also explored human sexuality in her novel "Veronica", her most recent book before this story collection. "Veronica" showed its heroine, a model named Alison, in several locations, including her hometown in New Jersey, San Francisco, Paris, and New York City. The stories in "Don't Cry" are likewise set in a variety of places including Ann Arbor, Toronto, New Paltz,New York, Detroit, and, in the title story of the collection, Ethiopia. Yet the more important setting of each story is in the heart.
Gaitskill is considerably better with women characters than with men. (Men are the leading characters in only two of the stories. In , "Descriptions", the better of the two, two young writers, friends from childhood, go on a hike and discuss their ambitions and their relationships with their female creative writing instructor. The second and weaker story, "The Arms and Legs of the Lake", describes the reaction of a veteran and his travelling companions to the war Iraq.) The women in these stories are generally in their 20's or 30s. They tend to be preoccupied with their looks. They are awkward about their bodies and their sexuality. For example, the opening story "College Town: 1980" is set in Ann Arbor and shows drifting young women with a mixture of shallowness and vulnerability.
Some of the women in Gaitskill's are married, some divorced, and some casually involved with a man -- or with many men. One story, "Today I'm Yours" involves a primarily lesbian relationship between women who move as casually betwen themselves as do men and women in the remaining stories. Many of the stories involve lurid sexual scenes or behaviors. The characters frequently reflect on their relationships with their parents, especially their fathers. Frequently, the settings shift in the stories between present and past. The shifts are sometimes bewilderingly swift and hard to follow. Many of the stories place great emphasis on dreams of the characters as a means of showing what troubles them in their lives.
As an adolescent and young woman, Gaitskill herself had experience as a stripper and as a prostitute, and the stories reflect this in many ways in their treatment of sexuality. Women academics and critics also have prominent roles in the stories. An excellent story bringing several of Gaitskill's themes together is "The Agonized Face" which takes place at a literary convention in Toronto. The narrator, a divorced literary critic, hears a prominent feminist speak at the convention. While sympathetic in part, the narrator concludes that the feminist writer, with her support for the independence of women, does not have a full understanding of the relationship between women and men, of the nature of sexuality, or of its pain. In another excellent story, "Mirror Ball" a young woman engages in a one-night stand with a musician and feels her character and her person diminished permanently by the experience. Gaitskill does not speak as a puritan or in the voice of fundamentalist religion. But her stories are eloquent about the consequences of divorcing sex from human personhood -- a theme explored explicitly in "Folk Song.". A few of the stories in the collection have more topical themes, such as the war in Iraq, and tend to be less successful.
The title story in the collection has a somewhat broader theme than the remaining stories. It describes a middle-aged single American woman who travels to Ethiopia in the hopes of adopting a child to alleviate her loneliness. She travels with an old friend, Janice, whose husband had died six months earlier. Her late husband had been 20 years older than Janice, and he had left another woman to marry her. Before he died, Janice had been unfaithful to him in a short casual affair. The memory of her husband and her brief unfaithfulness torments Janice during the trip to Ethiopia in the midst of its poverty and political instability. The story develops some of Gaitskill's main themes, but it loses something as it broadens out.
The writing in these stories is not at the consistently high level of "Veronica" but they include much that is beautiful and effective. Gaitskill is a writer that does best with her own individual perspective and narrow range of themes. Her stories emphasize the depths of human sexuality and its power to destroy. It is a troubling, important reminder for our day and place.
Robin Friedman
Summary of Don't Cry: Stories
Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories--her first in more than ten years.In ?College Town l980,? young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale ?Mirrorball,? a young man steals a girl?s soul during a one-night stand; in ?The Little Boy,? a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in ?The Arms and Legs of the Lake,? the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson--three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier?s uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls.
Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body--or of the intelligent body with the craving mind--that is characteristic of Gaitskill?s fiction. As intense as Bad Behavior, her first collection of stories, Don?t Cry reflects the profound enrichment of life experience. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths--?the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house,? as one character puts it--remain unchanged.
Amazon Best of the Month, March 2009: Mary Gaitskill has a reputation as the chronicler of bad relationships, but that label doesn't do justice to the stories she tells. Her relationships turn bad, or turn good, or just turn (and turn and turn). In every exploitation there's an attraction, or at least an accommodation; in every hostility there's a yearning for, or at least a memory of, connection. You see the intensity of people--friends and family as well as lovers--drawn together, and the often equally intense emptiness when the magnet flips and repels. Gaitskill is one of our best short story writers (that's a label that's fully just) and the prickly, sad brilliance of her last book, Veronica, confirmed her as a master of the novel, too. Don't Cry is just her third story collection in 20 years, after the modern classics Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, and it reminds you immediately of why you've been longing to read her again. Once more, there are former lovers and ex-friends and parents and children who have not quite made a hash of things, but there's also a broadening in this collection, especially in the title story, which looks at the ties of family and friendship when they are stretched across the global distance of privilege and poverty. --Tom Nissley
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