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What Would Happen if You Couldn't Stop Crying?Mary Gaitskill's deeply strange new vision.

By Claire DedererPosted Monday, March 30, 2009, at 11:55 AM ET

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In other words, the girl tries to be normal. She tries to define her experience through the accepted language of emotion. But Gaitskill is never interested in accepted language. She rejects the usual psychological readings of the self. What we call emotional reality, Gaitskill calls categories.

Gaitskill wants to show something more terrible and, to her mind, more real that is happening to the girl, that happens maybe to all girls who give their souls away to boys. She writes, "Where her soul had once held space, there was a ragged hole, dark and deep as the pit of the earth. At the bottom of it ran boiling rivers of Male and Female bearing every ingredient for every man and woman, every animal and plant."

This writing could be called humorless and pretentious; it could also be called brave and even majestic. Gaitskill refuses to diminish the girl's experience. She magnifies it until it achieves the same largeness of scale that Chekhov gave to the girl in the woods, mourning her dead baby. There's almost a defiance going on here: Gaitskill won't choose one kind of event as more important than another. In adult life, we put things safely in categories. Gaitskill doesn't, won't.

This is her project throughout the book: to remind us that people's experience ought not to be gainsaid. Experience ought to be explored and revealed, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The women in this book lament their dead fathers; go crazy; have sex with 1,000 men, literally; work menial jobs; lose their spouses; have love affairs; wonder why their children have turned out not so great. Their stories are sometimes ordinary and sometimes disturbing. Sometimes the women have naughty sex, as in Gaitskill stories of yore. Sometimes they just walk through an airport. Gaitskill treats them as though there's no difference. Her pitiless seeing, her occasional grandiosity, is dispensed to them all.

In the title story, a small masterpiece, we again encounter the writing teacher, Janice, from the story "Description." Recently widowed, she's visiting Addis Ababa with a friend who is trying to adopt a child there. During her time in Ethiopia, Janice witnesses terrible poverty and civil war. She becomes horribly upset when a necklace, which is threaded with her wedding ring and her dead husband's wedding ring, is snatched from her neck. Eventually, the rings are returned to her. Years later, Janice tells the story of the purloined necklace at a party. A fellow partygoer who has spent a lot of time in Africa says to her, "Really, you make too big a fuss of yourself. You should not go to Africa and then make such a fuss."

Making a fuss: It would be a good title for this book, whose message is at ironic odds with its actual title. Do cry, these pages insist. The onetime mistress of transgression, the former high priestess of literary cool, has written a deeply compassionate book. Gaitskill's book says, Your pain matters. All pain matters. Don't be afraid to make a fuss.

It is a deeply disorienting invitation. And possibly a dangerous one. If you started crying and didn't stop, what would happen to you? What would you become? Maybe you would become a character in a Mary Gaitskill story. Your outsized pain would mark you as one of her people—people whose responses aren't appropriate to the given circumstance. There's a given, agreed-upon scale of human misery: The dead baby is more tragic than the sad aftermath of a one-night stand. And yet our responses don't always come tailored to size.

Gaitskill sees this, and goes further. She insists that it's during these moments of pain, appropriately sized or not, that we fall into a mysterious place, where we're all linked by our most elemental selves: In the "center of the earth," we exist merely as "Male and Female." In her writing, she imbues this place with a richness, and even a sense of possibility. We might learn empathy in this awful place, or we might flee it and try to avoid pain for the rest of our lives, or we might emerge so badly damaged that we're more alone than ever. But Gaitskill never doubts that the place exists. We all might visit it one day or another.

Slate V: Mary Gaitskill discusses the trashy novels that influenced her writing and explains why Veronica took so many years to complete: