The Mare
By Mary Gaitskill, Pantheon, 464 pages, $27
The American writer Mary Gaitskill, whose work alternates between novels and short stories, is a writer of prodigious gifts, not least the ability to translate the untidy, painful grit of human relationships into powerful, crystalline prose without sacrificing any of their strangeness.
Witness, for example, her use of sado-masochism, most famously in her short story “Secretary”, which became a film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal; or the construction of a charismatic, Ayn Rand-style objectivist in her debut novel, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin”. Her third novel appears a little over a decade after “Veronica”, which explored a counterintuitive friendship between two very different women, one a model, the other a proofreader, both at odds with the world at large. “The Mare”, too, thrives on the idea and the actuality of social collision; what it represents to us in terms of a radical challenge to the deeply embedded stratification of haves and have-nots, and how it is experienced by complex, damaged, frail, angry and desiring human beings.
What lies, asks Gaitskill, in the gap between the theory and the reality?
The terrain she chooses comes littered with traps and obstacles, many pointing us straight towards the quagmire of cliché. Ginger is a 47-year-old woman, and therefore immediately in the societally perceived danger zone of declining fertility, approaching menopause and wavering sexual appeal; she is also a recovering addict and a not entirely successful artist, with a painful family past to boot. Now married to Paul, a college professor she met in AA, she has somehow scrambled a relatively conventional life in upstate New York; there is a sense, from the novel’s start, that she occupies the ambiguous position of the person rescued from both disaster and herself, who winds up at an altogether different destination from the one suggested by her original course.
But that rescue has not furnished Ginger with everything she needs to pass incognito in bucolic small-town America; she and Paul have no children together, although he has a teenage daughter from his first marriage. Their childlessness is partly a matter of timing, and partly of will, or the lack of it; when Ginger begins to think about adoption, she realises that Paul’s reluctance may in part be explained by his suspicion that “I hadn’t really tried to have his child, but now I wanted some random one”.
As a compromise-cum-trial-run, they decide to volunteer for an organisation that sends inner-city children to the countryside for a couple of weeks in summer. In short order, they are sent Velvet, an 11-year-old Dominican girl from Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and form a bond with her that sees a fortnight extend to frequent if sporadic visits over a period of years.
“The Mare” tells that story in first-person fragments; Ginger and Velvet’s voices alternate, with occasional appearances from Paul and Silvia, Velvet’s explosively angry, frightened and bewildered mother.
The problematic implications of this setup are immediately obvious, and numerous. The folly of interacting with a real child in order to test out a notional future relationship with an imaginary one (versus the obverse: the folly of rushing into that relationship with no experience or sense of one’s aptitude whatsoever). The insanity of plucking an unknown individual from their environment and catapulting them into an entirely different one, then promptly removing them again (versus the alternative of denying them respite from difficult circumstances). The idiocy of imagining that either adults or children could take in their stride the altered emotional dynamics created by such a situation — could simply absorb the contrasts of wealth and poverty, of the experiences of different racial groups, of expectation and acceptance, freedom and stultification.
And this is before we get to love. “The Mare” is based, in part, on Gaitskill’s own experience of two children who came to stay with her and her husband over several years, but it is not the first time she has written about it. In 2007, she published an essay in Granta entitled “Lost Cat”, in which she described the near unendurable pain she experienced when her stray cat, Gattino, disappeared; in the same piece, she also wrote about her relationship with the children “Natalia” and “Caesar”, and the death of her father. “It is hard to protect a person you love from pain,” she wrote at the start of the essay, “because people often choose pain; I am a person who often chooses pain.”
Towards the end, she creates an extraordinary image to represent the troubles that punctuated the joyful parts of her relationship with the children: “But I often felt inadequate, wrong, unable to affect them, frustrated, mismatched — at best like a well-intentioned mouse crazily trying to chew two bear cubs out of a massive double net cast upon them by powers beyond its tiny vision.”
“The Mare” explores all those feelings — inadequacy, optimism, craziness — and sets them in the context of love, and of need. Ginger swiftly identifies her reaction to Velvet as love, and we can often see that it is: it persists in the face of rejection or disdain, of absence or indifference. We can also see the need that edges into fear: the need to satisfy an urge — in this case characterised as maternal — to nurture and ameliorate, but also to possess, to bind another to oneself; the fear of transgressing another’s boundaries, heightened in this instance by Ginger’s dread of participating in the narrative of the white saviour.
Part of that narrative, of course, involves the story being written by the most powerful narrator. In giving at least half of the novel over to Velvet, Gaitskill redresses the balance. Velvet’s name is, obviously, an echo of Velvet Brown in Enid Bagnold’s 1935 novel “National Velvet”, the child who rode her horse to victory in the Grand National, disguised as a boy. Gaitskill’s Velvet becomes obsessively interested in an unpredictable, temperamental horse in the stables next to Ginger and Paul’s house. She is a teller of gripping tales; as unreliable a narrator as Ginger, she pursues her love of the mare with astonishing single-mindedness, seeing in her both a kindred spirit and, perhaps, an escape free from adult comprehension.
Velvet is also a child turning-woman; back in Crown Heights, she frequently slips the restrictions laid down by her mother — violent, abusive, constantly privileging her son’s needs over Velvet’s, and clearly working out some of her own rage and guilt through her daughter — to wander in the city, a ghostly future of teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, possibly death, hovering before her.
No wonder Velvet is manipulative; no wonder her mother punishes her, while constantly anticipating catastrophe; no wonder Ginger worries herself into a frenzy of activity and anxiety around her. No wonder Paul has an affair; no wonder Paul’s ex-wife delivers her vindictive barbs. At a crudely superficial level, everyone in “The Mare” behaves true to type; it is in its more subterranean depths that the mystery of attachment begins to show itself.
Gaitskill is a writer who situates herself in a version of reality, and then studs it with the portents and symbols of the unconscious; the tiny box of found objects, including a broken doll that looks like Ginger, that Velvet keeps close; the news reports from the Iraq war that float from the car radio into Ginger’s agitated brain. And while “The Mare” is not perfect — sustaining a child’s voice is near-impossible, and the book’s adherence to an unfolding temporal narrative means that it lapses into episodic repetitiveness — it is bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
