Gaitskill’s willingness to ignore common wisdom and consider controversial and complex questions from different viewpoints...
This insightful fictional take on a #MeToo scandal offers fresh perspectives and avoids easy answers.
The #MeToo movement is arguably not known for nuance; common narratives often portray victims, villains, and little in between. In her novels, essays, and short stories, however, Gaitskill (Somebody With a Little Hammer, 2017, etc.) frequently explores the shaded contours and subtle seesaws of sexual power dynamics and conjures complex characters that resist our urge to fit them into delineated categories of morality and culpability. In this novella, originally published on the New Yorker's website, Gaitskill introduces two characters swept up—one directly and one indirectly—in a could-have-been-ripped-from-the-headlines #MeToo moment and, in brief, alternating chapters, allows them to tell their own stories. Quin is an elegant, eccentric, well-connected New York book editor who, although married to a beautiful fashionista and the father of a precocious daughter, enjoys engaging with women he meets, at work and elsewhere, intimately and sexually—toying with them, his friend Margot suggests, in a “vaguely sadistic” yet ultimately harmless way. But is it harmless? Are the women emphatically victims and Quin the culprit? And if so, is the punishment Quin is facing—losing his career and social standing—commensurate with his crime? Margot, who rebuffed Quin’s sexual advance early in their long friendship, before she acquired her own publishing-world power, believes the young women who have accused Quin of wrongdoing were, at least in some cases, willing participants in and beneficiaries of Quin’s sexual game-playing and that he does not deserve to be punished so harshly. Is Margot correct, or is her judgment clouded by friendship? Does she herself deserve disdain as an enabler? Gaitskill provides room for readers to disagree, ultimately raising more questions than answers. “The best story is one that reveals a truth,” Quin asserts, “like something you see and understand in a dream but forget as soon as you wake up.” The indefinite article is everything there. In this novella, Gaitskill reveals two truths—Quin’s and Margot’s—and reminds us that the truth can be painfully elusive.
Gaitskill’s willingness to ignore common wisdom and consider controversial and complex questions from different viewpoints is a true literary pleasure.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-524-74913-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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