"Tiny, Smiling, Daddy" is in the collection Because They Wanted To. Gaitskill is an extremely dark writer and pleasure (for me) is derived from recognizing truths in her stories and in the quality of her writing. I like a story that makes me examine issues I have known or been made aware of in myself and others and this one does. Who doesn't know a father (or mother) who lacks what they need to connect with their child.
In this story a father has shunned his daughter since her teenage announcement that she is a lesbian. His feelings toward her had already been affected by things like nose piercings and her failure to set the table correctly. As a small child, Kitty was close to her parents but that changes as she changes. This announcement leads to Stew (and his wife) telling Kitty she's free to leave and make her own way in the world.
The story begins with a phone call from a friend telling Stew that Kitty has published a story about their relationship in a magazine titled "Self." Stew gets a copy of the magazine and although there is really nothing surprising in her article, it sort of sums up what their relationship has been, which is sad and shocking for Stew. He then thinks back on his relationship with his father, which was distant, harsh and short.
The success of this story for me is that although Stew behaves badly in this story, by the end you feel some sympathy for him because he is so clueless about nearly everything in his life. You know he won't change.
10 comments:
Sounds like a nicely layered story, Patti. Glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks, Margot!
Diane's Book Club read some Mary Gaitskill's books. I have a couple of Gaitskill's books in one of my stacks of books!
They are dark. But she is a very good writer.
Never read her, but sounds good. My father acted a little like that when my sister came home with her black boyfriend, but he did change. I suppose it didn't help that she had always had a problematic relationship with my parents. In the end, she didn't come to his funeral.
This week I read mostly ghost stories in the Occult Detective collection FIGHTERS OF FEAR, which was readable but pretty much left me cold. Now reading another book I found in the basement, MURDER & OTHER ACTS OF LITERATURE, edited by Michele B. Slung, with stories by John Cheever, Eudora Welty, T. H. White, Anthony Trollope, Alice Walker, and Edith Wharton, among others. I hadn't read any Welty since high school, but I enjoyed her odd "The Hitch-Hikers."
That sounds like a good collection. I have Welty's collected stories. I will see if it's in there.
The Subtitle is "Twenty-four Unforgettable and Chilling Stories by Some of the World's Best-Loved, Most Celebrated Writers" - others are Isabel Alende, Isak Dinesen, Faulkner, Nadine Gordimer, Kipling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Muriel Spark, Paul Theroux, William Trevor, Waugh, Fay Weldon, Virginia Woolf.
You just never know what people will donate to the basement library. I've paged through the Barbara Stanwyck biography, but it's huge and I think it was only the first of two volumes.
Yeah, Megan tried to get me to read Stanwyck but no one is that interesting, right?
Anyone can be, depending on what they did and how its related to other matters...but it's a tough thing to pull off.
Michele Slung's a good editor, and has been working with Otto Penzler over the decades, so clearly is at least something of a diplomat as well...
And Gaitskill is a good writer, and that certainly sounds like an acute portrayal of those who have been shut down and thus obsessed with that which actually doesn't matter too much. Somehow I'm reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous advice to his daughter...after several actually useful points, he includes "Worry about horsemanship." Well, we can hope he was joking.
Glad you checked in for the exercise!
I'm emotionally averse to "dark" these days. Enuf bad stuff--a huge black crow is flapping back and forth past my front door at this very moment, at least not shouting "Nevermore"--has been embedding itself in my cerebral hard drive over recent years to encourage me either to laff it off in a nihilistic way or to seek instead reading material with a chance to lift my spirits. I do a little of both. I know the dark side of human nature all too well--more than I wish to retrieve for myself or to share if there's no chance of redemption. I sure as hell am no pollyanna, nor am I a hardened cynic resenting the average mortal for disillusioning my sense of the way things should be....well maybe a little resentment--it is true that what is said on your blog, stays on your blog, right, Patti? ;)
I've been struggling with a nasty sinus infection this week, so haven't had the spirit to dredge up another contribution to SSW. Maybe next year.
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