BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO: STORIES

Rating:
Summary: Because They Wanted To
Review: Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To is a short story collection I'd like to strongly recommend. Each of the 9 stories (the last being "The Wrong Thing", which is a sequence of four narratives) are at equal turns beautiful and harrowing--and very very human. Her characters, such as the young babysitter in the title story, are so real and recognizable that they often unnerve the reader with their frailities. This is writing that cuts deep, so deep in fact that it can't help but affect the reader in a personal way. As much as I was disturbed by the young woman's action at the conclusion of the title story (I won't give anything away here!), I also understood it--and that is the power of Ms. Gaitskill's writing. She's not spinning yarns about distant worlds, she's writing about us. Her characters are no more heroic or perfect than, let's say, our parents, or siblings, or friends. Who doesn't know the father and daughter in "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" or Margot and Patrick in "Orchid"? In Because They Wanted To, Mary Gaitskill has produced stories of breath-taking honest. I suppose it would be easy to focus on the things in the collection that seem unsettling, but to do so would be a real injustice to the other layers--the subtleties and details of the writing, the incredible empathy that Gaitskill has toward her characters. These qualities are best displayed in "Blanket" and "Comfort"; the latter being so finely rendered that it left its mark on this reader long after I'd finished the book. And while some of the characters seem despicable, they are no more despicable than you or I, and at times they resonate like old friends. If only we could be so well-written.

Rating:
Summary: Mediocre/Bad
Review: OK- the 1st time I heard of Gaitskill was when I saw Secretary & that was based on her story in "Bad Behavior". "Bad Behavior" I thought was mediocre, but had some potential. This book I found terribly dull. The characters are cliched abuse cases & the situations are predictable. The one story from where the title is taken is about a 16 yr old runaway who baby sits for a mother who never comes home that night. Then that's it. The conversations are not insightful, in fact there's really not much to say about them at all. I felt this was a very lazy book. For a better read, I recommend Emily Carter's "Glory Goes and Gets Some." While not all the stories are great, many are very good & the books have similar tropes- with Carter's dealing with someone with HIV/drugs & Gaitskill's with sex & whatever else. Yet Carter's is far superior because her descriptions are much more insightful & the characters more developed. Just goes to show you how it's not the subject matter, but the way something is written that makes it work.