Pitiless Eye

KATHRYN HARRISON in The New York Times:

Harrison-190 Fiction gives readers access to the private lives of characters who don’t know they’re being watched, people who seem real — as real as the reader, if their creator is sufficiently skilled — and whose unspoken thoughts and feelings are plundered for whatever enlightenment or diversion they might offer. No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill. “Don’t Cry,” her third collection of stories, confirms what made “Bad Behavior” and “Because They Wanted To” such idiosyncratic and memorable books. She has a perturbing ability to generate what seems as much a vivisection as a narrative, slicing through her characters to expose interior lives that are more often “broken or incomplete” than in any way admirable. The people in Gaitskill’s stories often behave unconventionally and impulsively; they may seem to have an agency outside their author’s control, doing what not even she could expect, but they never escape her pitiless eye and meticulous hand.

Fiction gives readers access to the private lives of characters who don’t know they’re being watched, people who seem real — as real as the reader, if their creator is sufficiently skilled — and whose unspoken thoughts and feelings are plundered for whatever enlightenment or diversion they might offer. No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill. “Don’t Cry,” her third collection of stories, confirms what made “Bad Behavior” and “Because They Wanted To” such idiosyncratic and memorable books. She has a perturbing ability to generate what seems as much a vivisection as a narrative, slicing through her characters to expose interior lives that are more often “broken or incomplete” than in any way admirable. The people in Gaitskill’s stories often behave unconventionally and impulsively; they may seem to have an agency outside their author’s control, doing what not even she could expect, but they never escape her pitiless eye and meticulous hand.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Alia Raza).