Salon.com > Mary Gaitskill

“Crawling at Night” by Nani Power

Thu, 05 Apr 2001 02:00:00 +0000

The title of Nani Power's remarkable debut novel is explained in that novel's epigraph as "an antiquated expression born of the Japanese farmer's tradition of accommodating large groups of overnight visitors on futons across the floor." Apparently, a gentleman visitor interested in sharing a strange lady's futon could tactfully cover his face with a cloth and crawl in with her. If rejected, he could return to his futon in dignified anonymity, "at least in theory." It's a wonderful and civilized notion, striking in its combination of delicacy and good-natured bluntness, and it is an apt introduction to Power's novel -- although few of her characters make their exit with dignity or anonymity intact.

The action of "Crawling At Night" takes place during a jumbled, alcohol-saturated 48 hours in Lower Manhattan; the story is a dramatic multicharacter collision of personality, culture and circumstance that is as much about emotion and memory as it is about events. The main characters are Ito, an aged, lonely Japanese sushi chef with a complex inner life that he has no language to articulate to those around him, and Mariane, an aging, alcoholic sexpot waitress who would prefer that her inner life remain as unarticulated as possible, even to herself. Although she is no longer pretty, Ito has a crush on Mariane because her raw femaleness reminds him of a young Chinese prostitute he used to love, and because his sense of her hardship rouses him emotionally.

Sex, capitalism and antidepressants

Mon, 14 Aug 2000 08:59:00 +0000

Mary Gaitskill, author of the short story collections "Bad Behavior" (1988) and "Because They Wanted To" (1997) and the novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" (1991), and I have been corresponding by e-mail for some months on literature, sex and contemporary Western culture. Gaitskill is an incisive and fierce critic of what's deplorable at present, and also a passionate protector of what she thinks might still work for writers and thinkers these days. Perhaps the two of us exemplify the problems at hand, in that this conversation never took place as a conversation; rather, it occurred only in the confines of an e-mail exchange. Yet we're attempting to indicate the possibility that literature and other marginalized discourses might still flourish inside the machine of Western consumer culture. What follows, then, are excerpts from the most recent weeks of our epistolary tjte-`-tjte.

-- Rick Moody

Men at extremes

Mon, 15 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

A fictionalized account of Nat Turner's slave rebellion. I have read that many African-Americans did not like this story, told by a white man, and I can understand that on principle. However, having known nothing of Turner when I began the book, I finished it feeling awed and moved by his life. I've never read anything that so clearly revealed the concept of benevolent slavery as an impossible lie; Turner's owner is portrayed as a genuinely kind person, but in spite of his intentions, his kindness becomes a more deeply destructive cruelty in the end. Styron makes us understand how Turner, portrayed as a profoundly moral man with a sensitive nature, could become a killer. Even though he killed civilians, including an innocent young girl who had been friendly to him, I saw him as a hero. I don't know if the book tells the literal truth about Nat Turner, but for me that's beside the point. It is an extraordinary story of a fight for justice, of how honor and mercy destroyed can come to life again.

Alice Adams

Wed, 09 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so
above her knees and flat heels without stockings. She looked a little impatient, a little crabby and very elegant. I thought: Unbelievable. No stockings, and she's making it work. Part of her success was simply that she had preternaturally beautiful legs and a slim figure. But the rest of it was a blend of qualities I was to discover over the next 10 years of our acquaintance. Alice possessed intense elegance, grace and an organic mental integrity that was distinctly feminine in nature. These qualities were not only aesthetic; they were her way of being.

Short list

Tue, 06 Apr 1999 00:46:00 +0000

"Vandals" by Alice Munro
This is an extraordinarily deep and complex story. It is also subtle -- I had to read it several times before I understood it. Told through an older woman, Bea, who has loved a hard, cruel man, and a young girl, Liza, who was close to them both, the story is broadly about territory, nature, control, sex and rage. Most profoundly, it is about motherhood -- or the abdication of it -- and the girl's rage at the older woman for refusing to behave like a mother when the girl needs her to. "Vandals" is one of the most powerful, artistically beautiful things I've ever read.

"Under the 82nd Airborne" by Deborah Eisenberg
A deluded Blanche Dubois-esque woman travels to a war zone to visit her daughter, thinking she's about to have a vacation on a beach. Reading the story, I was reminded of an interesting definition of sin I once heard -- that it is first an abandonment of yourself. The heroine, who has abandoned herself before we meet her, is both contemptible and heart-rending, and Eisenberg moves her through a failing, chaotic world described with delicacy and a rare sense of intelligent wonder. The end is a knockout.

Satan goes to Harvard

Mon, 13 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

on May 28, 1995, a murder was committed at Harvard University: Sinedu Tadesse, a 20-year-old Ethiopian scholarship student, stabbed her roommate Trang Ho, a gifted 20-year-old Vietnamese immigrant also on a scholarship. More precisely, Tadesse stabbed Ho 45 times with a hunting knife she had bought expressly for that purpose while Ho lay sleeping in bed. Tadesse then hung herself with a noose she had prepared in advance. The crime was stunning not only because it was savage, but because, as a Harvard official commented at the time, "there (was) no apparent reason." All the ensuing media coverage, and all the speeches and meetings seemed to make the event more mysterious, not less.

In "Halfway Heaven," Melanie Thernstrom, a Harvard graduate who also taught there, addresses this mystery with intelligence, tenacity and courage. She appears to have felt the tragedy deeply and to have striven mightily to understand it. Unfortunately, she also strove to resolve it -- unfortunately because by the last third of the book her desire for resolution has apparently shriveled her capacity to understand. "Halfway Heaven" starts as a thorough, meaty and humane illumination; it ends as a Hollywood movie about Good and Evil. This ending not only disappointed me, it made me angry. A story like this urgently needs our deepest compassion, for both the perpetrator and the victim, not only for the sake of the dead, but for the rest of us as well. And dramas of Good and Evil simply don't allow room for much more than a sentimental counterfeit.

Personal Best: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Mon, 30 Sep 1996 10:06:00 +0000

i picked up this book on impulse during an odd pocket of time about seven years ago. I was living alone in a very isolated area and I was having insomnia so severe that I was only sleeping one to three hours a night. On top of that, when I did sleep, I had intense nightmares, all on the theme of brutish men viciously killing and/or raping women -- me for example. The dreams were terrifying, but they were also bewildering; while they could be explained by real-life fears, I felt they were more about me than anything external, and because I very much wanted to understand them, I thought a lot about them. Solitude, sleep deprivation, nightmares and self-examination are a loopy combination, and I spent my many waking hours moving in and out of an half-dream state in which the violent images from my subconscious loomed about me, leering ridiculously as I nodded off in the grocery store checkout line.

It was in this state that I saw Hugo's classic in a bookstore, and while I had never wanted to read it previously, I had a strong, if addled, intuition to pick it up.

My Inspiration: Vladimir Nabokov

Sun, 12 Nov 1995 20:00:00 +0000

In an interview, Vladimir Nabokov was once asked to comment on the popular authorial truism that one's fictional characters can sometimes "take over" and dictate to the author the course of a story. In his supercilious dismissal of this whimsical idea, Nabokov described his characters as "galley slaves" -- a comment exuding the playful, haughty spirit that drove (and still drives) some critics nuts. Such critics condemn Nabokov's authorial voice as elitist, inhuman and finally cruel. And that is an assessment his "slaves" might well agree with, subjected as they were to excruciating and ridiculous fates delineated in exquisite language and sparkling, albeit twisted, comic narratives.

To a reader with a defensive turn of mind who is waiting to be told how to live or to be shown the Truth in a piece of fiction, the ruthless and rigorous complexity of Nabokov's work may seem cruel simply because it does not offer either of these services. Some readers apparently interpret the very beauty of his prose as cruel -- and there is a hyper-refinement, an airy, curiously high-pitched quality to its beauty that can feel cruel simply because it throws the whole beastly, mundane, plodding corporeality of human beings into such grotesque relief. Through this Apollonian oeuvre there frolic countless tiny nymphets -- most famously, Lolita Haze, with her dim eyes and big, bright mouth, her narrow-shouldered, hipless, insouciant grace. And therein also stump Mrs. Haze and her 30-ish sisters, with their gross emotional needs, their dumpy legs, their ghastly hips and boobs, the unbeautiful human personified with a fastidious shudder.