Dark side of perfection

Rhinebeck, N.Y. —  AN interviewer once asked author Mary Gaitskill if she is as unhappy as her stories are dark. “I’m not happy or unhappy,” Gaitskill replied. “I’m Mary.” In Gaitskill’s complicated world, there are no clear-cut descriptions, no black-and-white answers. “I’ve always been a little bothered by people who divide people or experiences into wholly happy or unhappy,” she says.

It is the gray areas, those in-betweens, that Gaitskill explores in her body of work and the filter through which her characters grapple with the complexities of their lives.

The misfits, professionals, prostitutes and S&M; enthusiasts that populate her short stories share inner confusions and perversions, coexisting with cruelty and tenderness, each fighting for dominance. Her characters are often searching for connection, for love, for sexual gratification, for answers. They are lonely, get involved with the wrong people, worry about losing their looks. And on the inside, they are a mystery -- even to themselves. Gaitskill looks in, fascinated and unflinching. “Some people I feel I can understand very quickly,” she says, “others not at all.”

Her second novel, “Veronica,” publishing Tuesday, centers on a beautiful young model’s multifaceted friendship with an eccentric older woman who becomes sick with HIV. “Veronica” is narrated by ex-model Alison Owen. Now in middle age, her glittering career far behind her, Alison travels to her degrading job cleaning offices -- she suffers the pain and fatigue brought on by hepatitis C and a car accident. Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, she will relive “a woman’s whole life in a single day” to try to reach peace and understanding.

During her journey, objects, scenes from movies, pieces of dreams and bits of a fairy tale all touch her memory, bringing back fragments from her turbulent past that will ultimately reveal her rise and fall as a model and her strange and complicated friendship with an unconventional middle-aged woman named Veronica who died of AIDS complications.

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly says “Gaitskill’s style is gorgeously caustic and penetrating with a homing instinct toward the harrowing; her ability to capture abstract feelings and sensations with a precise and unexpected metaphor is a squirmy delight to encounter in such abundance.”

In Gaitskill’s idiom, we listen to “a fool on a radio show promote her book.” The fool “blooms out of the radio like a balloon with a face on it, smiling, wanting you to like her, vibrating with things to say.” A friend is “a short guy with a big head on a long rubbery neck that operates like a rotating turret, and words spray from his mouth like bullets.”

She frequently uses music to stir emotions in Alison’s nostalgic meditation. “I love music as an art form,” Gaitskill says, sipping a glass of white wine at her dining room table in upstate New York.

Her modest, two-story home sits on a quiet street, where neighbors have plenty of elbow room between houses. “If I could sing I probably would never have written. To me, music expresses things that are beyond words, really. It communicates so many complex things directly and simultaneously. It gets into your nervous system instantly in a way that writing can’t.”

The book weaves scenes from Alison’s life -- past and present -- like notes into a symphony. But it is her relationship with Veronica she tries the hardest to penetrate. What was the beautiful Alison’s affinity to this odd, garish woman?

Gaitskill suggests that none of us totally reveal ourselves. We remain shielded behind our masks, whether beautiful or flamboyant. “People are trapped in these forms that they don’t understand and are clawing at each other wanting to be something better,” she says. “We have a longing and a potential for this sort of genuine, fully expressed kindness and intelligence and connection that is always stopped because of what we are as people.”

At 51, she possesses delicate good looks and a fragile aura. She is slender, blond, dressed in a pale beige sleeveless dress with occasional bursts of subdued flowers. She is authoritative and articulate but can suddenly appear shy, with occasional downward glances, and even blushing at times. The blend of vulnerable attractiveness and drop-dead cool with fierce intelligence is a dynamic component in her allure.

Adapting to acclaim

GAITSKILL’S first book of short stories, “Bad Behavior,” electrified the publishing world in 1988 and earned her a devoted following (one of the stories was adapted into the film “Secretary”). She went from working hand-to-mouth jobs to the forefront of young American writers. “Suddenly, these stories I had written in my tiny apartment were being discussed in major publications,” she says.

“It felt as if the roof of my apartment had been lifted off. All of a sudden, I had a social identity, which I had no idea what to do with. I’d go to dinner parties that I would never had been invited to six months earlier, and I didn’t know what to say. Every time I opened my mouth people would look at me like I was about to say something incredibly sharp and cutting, and I was just thinking, ‘Don’t look at me that way.’ ”

Part of Gaitskill’s literary mystique is derived from her remarkable early life. In previous interviews she’s described a difficult childhood. The oldest of three girls, she was born in Kentucky and moved several times back and forth to Michigan. She was institutionalized as a teenager and ran away from home at 16. At various times she worked as a stripper, a masseuse and a prostitute. In the past, she has been willing to talk about these periods in her life. Today, she prefers not to discuss them.

“It’s not that I find that material odious or even that I’m uncomfortable talking about it. It’s just that that was me a long time ago. When you’re 30, what you did at 23 is bigger in your psyche. But when you’re 50, it’s kind of like, I’m not thinking of that anymore.”

Steven Shainberg’s film version of “Secretary” brought Gaitskill to a more mainstream audience, but most fans of that movie don’t like the story it’s based on. Gaitskill’s vision is much darker, less optimistic, bleak. The giddy film never brings out the pain and anguish of the story

Gaitskill says: “Whether you liked the movie or not, it’s just kind of impossible for it to be a bad thing when a movie comes out based on something that you’ve written. Back in 1984, when I wrote the story, if someone had told me, ‘One day this will be made into a movie starring James Spader as the lawyer,’ it would have made my life worth living.”

Written over the course of a decade, the creative process for “Veronica” was unusual for Gaitskill, whose other books include the collection of short stories “Because They Wanted To” and the novel “Two Girls Fat and Thin.” “I wrote the first draft in a year’s time -- much more quickly and roughly than I usually write,” says Gaitskill, who had been inspired by a female friend who died of AIDS complications in 1991. “I’m usually really meticulous in how I structure a draft. As a result, I don’t have to spend a tremendous amount of time in the rewrite.

“With ‘Veronica,’ I let myself be very fast and crude and I left out whole scenes, just roughly sketching things in. The advantage to that was that it was much more raw. Parts of it had a vitality and freshness that’s hard to get when you’re being very precise. But other sections felt as if it was undergraduate writing.”

It was only every few years that she would attempt to rework “Veronica,” but she remained ambivalent about the material. “I was in limbo with it,” she says. Then, in the late ‘90s, she went through a period of great confusion because she was changing as a writer. “I was writing stories, but I couldn’t finish them,” she says. “A metaphor that immediately pops into my mind is that I was trying to look out a window that was suddenly closed. I think now that it was a transition that I was trying to make.”

In 2001, an editor searching for new Gaitskill material read a draft of “Veronica” and became enthusiastic. “That’s when I really looked at it again and suddenly I knew what to do.”

Unrelenting pressure

SOME readers might feel “Veronica” represents an anger at beauty or views it as a destructive force. The Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” frames the book. In that story, a beautiful young girl is punished for her vanity.

“It’s more like anger at the idea of perfectionism,” Gaitskill says of “Veronica.” “It’s the way that beauty is sometimes treated and fetishized in a really cruel way. It’s an idea about perfection that isn’t only about beauty, it applies to a lot of ideas and attitude about life. America has become insane about perfecting things, like perfecting one’s mood, perfecting one’s performance, perfecting one’s mind, perfecting one’s body. It’s insane the way people are. It does make me angry, but I also just find it scary.”

Today, Gaitskill lives in Rhinebeck in the Hudson Valley with her husband of four years, writer Peter Trachtenberg, whom she met while they were teaching seminars at a Buddhist retreat. She teaches literature at Syracuse University, a post she says she likes, “depending on the students.”

Suggest to her that she has already left something behind for future generations, that her work will be read forever, and she says, “The way things are going, I’m not even sure there’s going to be a forever.”

But ask her if she always felt as if she had something big in her and she responds, “I used to have this image of myself -- a very modest idea of being big, really -- I pictured Norman Mailer and some other unnamed eminence in a photograph in Newsweek and I was in the photo in the background modestly looking down. This just seemed like the ultimate to me. It wasn’t self-abdicating.

“I was just an interesting person in the background. But sometimes the person in the background is actually the more interesting person.”

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Mary Gaitskill

Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles

When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 29

Contact: (323) 660-1175

Also

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 6 p.m. Oct. 30

Contact: (310) 443-7000