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.