By Beth Ann Fennelly. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 7).
The 31 pieces included in Mary Gaitskill’s new book, Somebody with a Little Hammer, were written over two decades, many of them originally book reviews. That normally makes for a very poor collection. Miscellanies can read as miscellaneous, scattershot assignments written for various editors in various magazine styles, as opposed to having been conceived of and executed through an author’s passion. Such collections often have no centrifugal force binding them. Further, such collections often smell a little past-their-sell-by-date; 20-year-old reviews might disparage books rightly forgotten, or heap early praise on books so heaped with post-publication prizes that the reviewer’s stance fails to enlighten. The earnest charge–“Rush out and buy this book!”–loses force when the book’s 10 years out of print.
Perhaps that’s why Gaitskill’s first book of nonfiction is such an accomplishment. This book shouldn’t be so compelling, but Gaitskill is incapable of writing a bad sentence, and her opinions are original and playful, and she always provides insight on much more than simply the item being reviewed.
The novels (and, less frequently, movies or music) to which she turns her clear and unsentimental judgments are revelatory, a kind of self-portrait through subject matter. She writes on some well-known texts, including the Book of Revelation, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.
She also writes on books that most of us haven’t read and probably never will, such as foot fetishist Elmer Batters’ From the Tip of the Toes to the Top of Her Hose, a collection of photographs taken from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, which Gaitskill calls “a loving and lewd celebration of female feet and big ol’ legs.” Gaitskill describes a few of these “stylish, energetic, humorous, and dirty” photos, using them to illustrate “the vulnerability and silliness of sexuality as well as its power.” Batters’ photos are not, it turns out, the subject of Gaitskill’s essay, only its catalyst. Those familiar with Gaitskill’s fiction, such as “Secretary,” (in Gaitskill’s words, a “story about a naive young masochist who yearns for emotional contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe and who winds up getting her butt spanked instead”) will recognize her fearless exploration of the less commonly explored aspects of human sexuality.
Mary Gaitskill
A handful of essays–some of the book’s longest and most developed–don’t approach their subjects through the gaze of the reviewer but through the rear-view, the memoirist’s contemplative backward gaze. Here, too, Gaitskill rejects sweet nostalgia. Her memoir on losing her cat turns surprisingly into a troubled and troubling essay and race and class privilege.
Another memoir opens, “In Saint Petersburg, Russia, I got hit in the head with a bridge.” We don’t know yet that Gaitskill and her husband are on a tourist boat, ducking to avoid the river’s low-clearance bridges, and this sentence feels so abrupt and inexplicable it’s as if we, too, suffer a blow to the head. The narrative reverses from here and explains the unlikely events that brought the couple to Russia. It will be 10 more pages before we pick up with the head-smacking bridge, the blood, and her trip to the hospital, all of the interspersed with Gaitskill’s memories of a young woman she had worked with years before, a stripper who’d fallen and banged her head on a curb, then entered into a coma and died. It’s a meditation on chance and memory, and it’s an immensely lively performance.
The book reviews Gaitskill has collected here can’t urge readers to “rush out and buy this book!” but I can. Rush out, book lovers, especially if you can make Gaitskill’s event at 5 p.m. Thursday at Lemuria Books in Jackson.
Beth Ann Fennelly is the poet laureate of Mississippi. Her Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs will be published in October by W.W. Norton.
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