The Mare
Mary Gaitskill, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307379740
Summary
The story of a Dominican girl, the Anglo woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her.
Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul, who wonder what it will mean to “make a difference” in such a contrived situation.
Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationship with Velvet over several years, as well as Velvet’s encounter with the horses at the stable down the road—especially with an abused, unruly mare called Fugly Girl.
With strong supporting characters—Velvet’s abusive mother, an eccentric horse trainer, a charismatic older boy who awakens Velvet’s nascent passion—The Mare traces Velvet’s journey between the vital, violent world of the inner city and the world of the small-town stable.
In Gaitskill’s hands, the timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with a timely story of people from different races and classes trying to meet one another honestly. The Mare is raw, heart-stirring, and original. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 11, 1954
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—Rhinebeck, New York
Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998).
Personal
Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky and attended the University of Michigan, where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award.
She has lived in New York City, Toronto, the Bay Area in California, where she sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway. In a conversation with novelist and short story writer Matthew Sharpe for BOMB Magazine, Gaitskill said she had wanted to become a writer from the age of 18 because "things are wrong in the world and I must say something.'"
Gaitskill married the writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. They separated in 2010. Gaitskill lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
Writing
Hoping to get pubished from the time she turned 21, Gaitskill finally made her book debut at the age of 34, with her 1988 story collection Bad Behavior. "Secretary," a story from the collection, deals with sadomasochism and is the basis for the 2002 film of the same name. Starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film according to Gaitskill has little in common with the story. Gaitskill referred to the adaptation as "the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice)."
Gaitskill's fiction typically centers on the inner conflicts of female characters and on subject matter often deemed taboo—not only sadomasochism but also prostitution and addiction. Gaitskill has been open about her own career choices, saying she had worked as both a stripper and call girl. She showed similar candor discussing her own rape in a Harper's essay, "On Not Being a Victim.
Recognition
Gaitskill's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To. Her novel Veronica (2005) was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year. That book is narrated by a former fashion model and centers on her friend Veronica who contracts AIDS. Writing in a 2006 Harper's article, Wyatt Mason said:
Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the past, she has described, with clarity and vision, the places in life where we sometimes get painfully caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release.
Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, but one constant has been Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita, she has said, "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life." Another consistently named influence is Flannery O'Connor. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/7/2015.)
Book Reviews
[An] 11-year-old Dominican-American...[girl from] Brooklyn is invited to spend a few weeks with a white couple in upstate New York.... Gaitskill is renowned for her edgy writing, but the book...treads into stereotype. More nuanced portrayals might have made Velvet’s bumpy growth into an independent young woman more palatable.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Gaitskill spares no one in this brutally honest story of poverty, bigotry, the secret life of adolescents looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places, and parental and marital dysfunction. The major and minor voices narrating this brilliant tapestry are wondrously original, poignant, and, despite all, not without hope. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic—juxtaposing urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, brown and white—and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting. She explores the complexities of love (mares, mères...) to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful thoroughbred.”
Kirkus Reviews
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