Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays

by Mary Gaitskill

Overview

Engaging, unusual essays written over the last two decades on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal—from the explosive date-rape debates of the ’90s to the ubiquitous political adultery of the ’00s, from Anton Chekhov to Celine Dion.
 
Here is Mary Gaitskill the essayist: witty, direct, penetrating to the core of each issue, personality, or literary trope (On Updike: “It’s as if [he] has entered a tiny window marked ‘Rabbit,’ and, by some inverse law, passed into a universe of energies both light and dark, expanded and contracted, infinite and workaday.” On Elizabeth Wurtzel: “If this kooky, foot-stamping, self-loathing screed is meant to be, as it claims, a defense of ‘difficult women,’ i.e., women who ‘write their own operating manuals’ . . . all I can say is, bitches best duck and run for cover.”) Gaitskill writes about the ridiculous and poetic ambition of Norman Mailer, about the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace, and, in the deceptively titled “Lost Cat,” about how power and race can warp the most innocent and intimate of relationships. Appearing in chronological order, the essays offer Gaitskill's thoughts and reactions, always with the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding that we have long valued in her fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307378224
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

MARY GAITSKILL is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and Don’t Cry, and the novels The Mare, Veronica (nominated for the National Book Award), and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, ArtForum, and Esquire, among many other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories (1993) and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998).

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

November 11, 1954

Place of Birth:

Lexington, Kentucky

Education:

B.A., University of Michigan, 1980

Table of Contents

A Lot of Exploding Heads
On Reading the Book of Revelation 3

The Trouble with Following the Rules
On “Date Rape,” “Victim Culture,” and Personal Responsibility 10

A Lovely Chaotic Silliness
A Review of The Fermata by Nicholson Baker 27

Toes ’n Hose
A Review of From the Tip of the Toes to the Top of the Hose by Elmer Batters, and Nothing But the Girl, edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener 30

Crackpot Mystic Spirit
A Review of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus 33

Bitch
A Review of Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel 36

Dye Hard
A Review of Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates 41

Mechanical Rabbit
A Review of Licks of Love by John Updike 46

I’ve Seen It All
Thoughts on a Song by Björk 53

And It Would Not Be Wonderful to Meet a Megalosaurus
On Bleak House by Charles Dickens 58

Remain in Light
On the Talking Heads 71

Victims and Losers: A Love Story
Thoughts on the Movie Secretary 76

The Bridge
A Memoir of Saint Petersburg 85

Somebody with a Little Hammer
On Teaching “Gooseberries” by Anton Chekhov 105

Enchantment and Cruelty
On Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie 111

Worshipping the Overcoat
An Election Diary 114

This Doughty Nose
On Norman Mailer’s An American Dream and The Armies of the Night 120

Lost Cat
A Memoir 131

I See Their Hollowness
A Review of Cockroach by Rawi Hage 180

Lives of the Hags
A Review of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic 185

Leave the Woman Alone!
On the Never-Ending Political Extramarital Scandals 191

Master’s Mind
A Review of Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk 199

Imaginary Light
A Song Called “Nowhere Girl” 205

Form over Feeling
A Review of Out by Natsuo Kirino 210

Beg for Your Life
On the Films of Laurel Nakadate 215

The Cunning of Women
On One Thousand and One Nights by Hanan al-Shaykh 222

Pictures of Lo
On Covering Lolita 229

The Easiest Thing to Forget
On Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love 235

She’s Supposed to Make You Sick
A Review of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn 241

Icon
On Linda Lovelace 248

That Running Shadow of Your Voice
On Nabokov’s Letters to Véra 261

Acknowledgments 271

Editorial Reviews

For many readers, Mary Gaitskill is a writer whose image precedes her work. Possibly you've seen Secretary; possibly you've just read the magazine profiles that pop up every time she has a new book out. The word those profile writers love to assign her is "dark." New York magazine once even went so far as to call her a "downtown princess of darkness." So far as one can tell, this word is used because her stories and novels (Bad Behavior, Veronica) are so often about people who can be said, in some way, to have chosen the way they suffer in life, and even to find some kind of fulfillment in that suffering. In America, where every life is supposed to be underwritten by the pursuit of happiness, Gaitskill's preoccupations are thought perverse and depressing by default.

Well, look closer: this collection of Gaitskill's prose gives us a writer best described as positively playful. In Somebody with a Little Hammer, which collects essays that have been published elsewhere, we get a writer so far from self-serious that she even jokes about her own brooding image. In a takedown of Gone Girl included in this collection, she relates her experience reading the book on a long rail journey: "By the time the train ride was over, I felt I was reading something truly sick and dark," she quips, "and in case you don't know, I'm supposedly sick and dark."

This piece, which originally appeared in Bookforum, is one of the more revealing things Gaitskill has ever written, although it isn't in the least autobiographical. It reveals instead a key distinction between the way Gaitskill thinks a book should work and the way a writer like Gillian Flynn thinks it should work. Gaitskill concedes that the novel is clever. She sees its cold, calculating anti-heroine, Amy, as powerfully hooking into an older idea that women are "filthy, vicious idiots" who "claw at each other/bond over who is doing it best." Yet that formulation of subjectivity bothers Gaitskill. She does not like the way the character reduces to these violent, controlling impulses. It doesn't fit her idea of the world, and more to the point it seems a little dangerous. "[T]his book seems a little too enamored with Amy's view of the world, and misuses its power in something like the way its protagonist misuses hers," Gaitskill concludes.

To someone accustomed to Gaitskill's "dark" image, this moralist's objection to Gone Girl might seem a little incongruous. But to a more careful reader, it's of a piece with the strong empathetic bent that has always guided her depictions of allegedly sick people. The power of her work has always derived from the small element of humanity she finds in her characters' Bad Behavior.

In nonfiction Gaitskill proves a very effective analyst of her own impulses. In this collection is her 1994 Harper's essay "On Not Being a Victim." (Here it has been wordily retitled "On 'Date Rape,' 'Victim Culture' and Personal Responsibility.") In it, Gaitskill describes a nonconsensual sexual experience that she says she described for years as a rape before coming to the conclusion that the word did not capture the complexity of the experience. It certainly was the case, she writes, that she hadn't wanted to have sex, but her experience of the world as governed by social codes had taught her that her own desires were less important than some imagined rules. "I didn't know what to do in a situation where no rules obtained and that required me to speak up on my own behalf," Gaitskill writes. "I had never been taught that my behalf mattered."

This qualified, considered view of difficult questions means that Gaitskill sacrifices the propulsive force of the firebrand for the more unsettled role of the essayist. The result is that it's much more difficult to forget the insights that she comes to. By tethering herself to the complexities of human experience, Gaitskill gets a lot more mileage out of her subject that a writer of lesser intelligence does.

Put together here, all her essays do seem to be making a similar point: what looks like one kind of humanity, from a distance, is actually something more internally conflicted, more lost to itself. In a piece about the film version of her short story, Secretary, Gaitskill finds herself objecting to the way that her main character's ambivalence was written out of the story. In a piece about Linda Lovelace, the star of the 1970s pornographic epic Deep Throat, she is concerned that all readings of the woman, who in her lifetime was both a porn star and an anti-pornography crusader, fail to embrace the notion that she could have had contradictory feelings about the whole thing. For example, of a memoir Lovelace once wrote about her allegedly abusive relationship, Gaitskill writes: "I imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. " And come to think of it, "very, very nuanced and contradictory" is probably a better way to describe Gaitskill than "dark." But that, of course, doesn't make for such a romantic headline.

Michelle Dean is a journalist, critic, and erstwhile lawyer whose writing has appeared at The New Yorker, Slate, The Nation, and The Awl.

Reviewer: Michelle Dean

The Barnes & Noble Review

Gaitskill fans will be pleased to learn that the wise iconoclasm of her fiction is also on display in this, her first nonfiction book…Gaitskill is reliably unsparing but never mean, nor clever for the sake of it; even when operating as a critic she retains an artist's appreciation for the labors of creative work. Those times she trains her eye on her own process…are particularly satisfying. So are the moments when we're treated to her theories on the purpose of story and form.

The New York Times Book Review - Kate Bolick

…a cool and formidable collection of essays, reviews and other matter…[Gaitskill] catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called "the dirt within," as well as any writer we have. Once you've read her, her little hammer continues to tap in your head.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 11/14/2016
This collection of essays spanning two decades has the same fearless curiosity about the human psyche that Gaitskill (The Mare) exhibits in her fiction, along with the same unerring precision of prose. The broad range of her reviews, which cover art and literature from the Book of Revelations to Gone Girl, are united by her demand for complexity, her fascination with “enchantment and cruelty” (the title for her piece on J.M. Barrie), and her disdain for sentimental complacency. Early reflections tease and knead language into towering baroque shapes, but essays such as “The Bridge,” on her visit to Saint Petersburg, and the astonishing “Lost Cat,” on losing her pet, Gattino, settle down to the work of attentive, metaphor-rich descriptions. In later essays, Gaitskill’s dryness veers toward the acerbic, shearing through the reductive and the bowdlerized. Even those essays which start with the broadest of subjects—myth, religion, literature—repeatedly turn inward, drawn by Gaitskill’s interest in complicated inner landscapes, her favorite theme of “the innately mixed, sometimes debased nature of human love,” and her unyielding “moral empathy” for the perversity of the human condition. The surprising, nimble prose alone is a delight, and the pages burst with insight and a candid, unflinching self-assessment sure to thrill Gaitskill’s existing fans and win her new ones. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"This collection of essays spanning two decades has the same fearless curiosity about the human psyche that Gaitskill exhibits in her fiction, along with the same unerring precision of prose . . . The pages burst with insight and a candid, unflinching self-assessment sure to thrill Gaitskill’s existing fans and win her new ones." —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

04/01/2017
Novelist and short story writer Gaitskill's (The Mare, Veronica, and others) first collection of essays spans the years 1994–2016. All of the pieces were previously published in magazines (e.g., Book Forum, Village Voice) or as book introductions (Charles Dickens's Bleak House). They are wide-ranging, from reviews of novels (e.g., Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl), movies (e.g., Secretary, video artist Laurel Nakadate), and music (e.g., Talking Heads, Bjork), to personal essays on grief, power, rape, and victim culture. Gaitskill has a straightforward, precise, sometimes blunt style that steers clear of cliché and sentimentality yet doesn't shy away from difficult subjects or painful observations. Many of the entries are brief, only three or four pages, with a few longer ones. "Lost Cat" reaches roughly 40 pages and is among the best in the collection. VERDICT Some of the older essays feel a little dated, but overall, this anthology offers a variety of thoughtful and thought-provoking pieces. While this is probably not the best introduction to Gaitskill's writing, fans will surely be eager to read it. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]—Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis

Library Journal

2017-01-04
Glimpses of a writer's life through a miscellany of reviews, anecdotes, and musings.In the title essay, fiction writer Gaitskill (The Mare, 2016, etc.) recalls teaching Chekhov's short story "Gooseberries" to an English class at Syracuse University. Living in an apartment in a run-down section of the city, struck by the contrast between her poor neighbors and affluent students, she thought about reading a passage from that story, spoken by a character who warns against complacency: "At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist" who deserve attention and care and that the good life may suddenly turn terribly bad. She never read the passage, deciding it was too simplistic, but the sentiment it expresses—a visceral sensitivity to the darkness of the human condition—underlies many of the strongest pieces in an up-and-down (mostly up) collection. In one essay she recalls the "desperate human confusion" that led to her becoming a born-again Christian at the age of 21; in another she struggles to understand what occurred in an experience she has described to herself as date rape. By far, the highlight of the collection is a long, haunting memoir, "Lost Cat," which weaves together memories of her adopting, and losing, a skittish kitten; her father's death; two children from a troubled home who visited with her and her husband from the Fresh Air Fund; and her ongoing relationship with one of them and his sister. The children were difficult and yet to Gaitskill seemed superior to her "not because of anything innate, but because of their exposure to brutal, impossibly complex social forces that they were made to negotiate every day of their lives." Other essays offer details of the author's own difficult youth: she ran away from home at 16 and spent years on the streets, at one point becoming a stripper. "I was promiscuous, even aggressively so," she admits. Gaitskill has not published a memoir, but this collection makes that prospect tantalizing.

Kirkus Reviews