Library books:
Let's do something awful, part 2.

I first read this book, Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, in summer 1993 when I was an intern at Macmillan in New York, proofreading and copyediting college English textbooks. The books were largely anthologies of short stories and plays, so I was proofreading things like True West and the Glass Menagerie. What could be better? And at $12 per hour I felt superflush (my rent was absurdly low -- I think $250/month -- due to an amazing subletting deal). I often ate lunch at one of those weird little midtown parks -- an empty lot on a normal street to which a waterfall had been added. I would eat my lunch (what did I eat? I somehow can't remember), read a bit, take a little nap, and return to work. That summer I read a lot of I don't know what fiction, books discussed in Shopping in Space, a book of criticism of so-called "Blank Generation" fiction -- a swath wide enough to contain, among others, Michael Chabon, Dennis Cooper, Catherine Texier, Bret Easton Ellis, Gary Indiana, and Mary Gaitskill. I guess other than Michael Chabon and Gary Indiana that's not such a wide range. Due, probably, to Shopping in Space, I read Gaitskill's Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Like me she had grown up in suburban Detroit, and she had gone to the University of Michigan, where I had just finished my junior year. A lot of Bad Behavior took place in areas I was sort of familiar with -- suburban places whose names I knew but that were a little grimier than the areas of the suburbs I knew well (that kind of suburban grime being, unlike Detroit grime, a little too immune to romanticizing to attract me).

And Mary Gaitskill really is grimy and spiky in a totally disarming way. "Let's do something awful," that great line from the Plot Against America, could be this book's epigraph. I was dazzled by Two Girls, Fat and Thin when I read it then. I still think Gaitskill is amazing -- completely in control on a sentence-by-sentence level. The plot fell apart for me a bit this time, and I seem to have developed a more delicate constitution in the past 15 years, as I found some of the sadism really sort of troubling in a way I know I didn't before, even though she's ultimately a very polite writer. Weirdly, I found the twinning of the characters annoying, even though I don't mind Martin Amis's overreliance on it. I know it's easy to make up a funny name, but the fat girl of the title's real name is Dottie Footie (I might be misspelling), though she changes it after she becomes a devote of an Ayn Rand-like figure. Dottie Footie.

Library books:
The dark side of the library.

I forgot that in the first batch of books I borrowed from the library was Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander. First, a moment to contemplate one of the greatest names ever, especially for someone as alienated as Auslander. Hello Foreigner, it could be translated as, from Hebrew for Shalom and German for Auslander. Also, Goodbye Foreigner. (Also, Peace Foreigner, but that's not as good). I'm pretty sure it's not a pseudonym. If it were it would be kind of vomitous, but I think it's just serendipity.

I'd read some pieces by him in the NYer, and particularly remember the piece about him walking from somewhere in New Jersey, I think, to a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden in a slippery attempt to stay kosher. It was very funny. But the book. For one, it's a bit looser than the NYer piece(s), but not in a good way -- it's just not as tight. But more problematically, from a library user's perspective, is that it's just not the kind of book I want to read straight through. He writes just like what he looks like, and he looks like this:


That is, his writing is just a little too belligerent and intense for me to take at long stretches, even though it's very good. But I had to return the book to the library (it was unrenewable because someone else wanted it). So I sort of quickly picked my way through, reading short, disjointed bits. Just because of the due date I liked a book less than I otherwise would have. Caveat borrower, is all I'm saying.