FICTION
‘The Mare’
Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon
$26.95, 464 pages
Mary Gaitskill was 33 years old when “Bad Behavior” established her reputation as a doyenne of dysfunction. Her debut collection of previously unpublished stories touched a nerve, fearlessly exploring topics ranging from sexual deviance and drug abuse to bedroom power dynamics. Later interviews and essays cemented her standing as literary fiction’s bulletproof bad girl, though the trickle of only five books over 27 years suggests a much more cautious temperament.
“The Mare,” her first novel in a decade, proves that she still knows how to push buttons, even in an era when nothing shocks anyone anymore. Readers and critics reacted with considerable disbelief once word got out that Gaitskill was writing a coming-of-age novel about a young girl who bonds with a very special horse.
The opening chapters don’t entirely allay the fears that cloying premise suggests, but “The Mare” eventually finds its legs as a provocative, well-crafted contemplation of cultural divisions, addictions and the hidden wounds that everyone carries.
From the start, there’s no denying the novel is homage to those feel-good pony classics cherished by generations of hippomaniac girls. The epigraph comes from one of the best-known entries of the genre, Enid Bagnold’s “National Velvet.” Gaitskill doubles down on the reference by naming her stubborn heroine Velveteen “Velvet” Vargas. Elizabeth Taylor, she most definitely is not.
This Velvet is a mouthy 11-year-old Dominican girl struggling to find love and security in a crime-ridden Brooklyn neighborhood. Her abusive mother seems to take perverse pleasure in seeing Velvet humiliated, often with the help of Dante, Velvet’s 6-year-old brother. A refrain of “you’re no good” and “it’s your blood that’s bad” plays on repeat in the girl’s head, an early clue to the mother’s bottomless cruelty.
Hope arrives via a charity that sends disadvantaged urban kids on two-week stays with affluent (mostly white) host families in upstate New York. Velvet gets paired with Ginger, the book’s other primary narrator, a childless 47-year-old former artist and recovering alcoholic. Reeling from the death of her sister, Ginger convinces her professor husband Paul to test the waters on foster parenting and maybe adoption.
Much of the enjoyment of the novel, especially in early chapters, comes in relishing Gaitskill’s muscular prose. Velvet’s biting opinions on adult behavior sound less like an 11-year-old and more like a burned-out teenager. When first meeting her hosts, Velvet observes, “[Ginger] was smiling, but something else in her face was almost crying. … She smiled like this lady in a movie I saw about a girl who everybody realizes is actually a princess.”
Soon enough Velvet is taking riding lessons at a nearby stable, which is where she encounters the title character. Unlike the novel’s many other volatile females, Fugly Girl (aka Fiery Girl) shows her scars on the outside. A past owner’s negligence has left deep cuts on the horse’s face, which Velvet likens to “the thorns on Jesus’ heart.” Her adoration of the damaged mare is immediate and almost uncanny. The same could be said for Ginger’s devotion to Velvet.
Velvet’s visit goes better than expected. “It was like we were both living a dream we had known from television and advertisements and children’s books,” says Ginger, “a dream that neither of us had believed in yet had both longed for without knowing.” The author’s longtime enemy, sentimentality, sneaks into certain scenes as warm-fuzzy moments accumulate. Gaitskill reasserts control by inserting periodic hints of menace. Paul notices “something unnerving about the way Ginger was toward Velvet, something fevered, with a whiff of addiction.” When Velvet talks about her mother, her quivering voice makes him “think of a shadow on the wall of a horror movie.” It’s no spoiler that Paul is proven correct on both counts.
And bigger blows land once Velvet returns to Brooklyn. Graphic outbursts shed light on just how horrific day-to-day life really is.
The novel unfolds in short (sometimes only a few sentences long) first-person chapters narrated most often by Velvet or Ginger. The love-starved adult is finely depicted as an articulate, sensitive user, the strongest and most believable character in the novel. Still, our empathy for Ginger fizzles fast due to her increasingly self-destructive choices.
A similar disenchantment happens with Velvet. It’s easy to admire the plucky young horsewoman’s defiant spirit and curse her rotten luck at home. Over time, Gaitskill reveals that the hot-to-trot preteen may not be such a reliable narrator after all.
Gaitskill may not be writing about the same reckless cast of speed freaks and fashion models from her previous books, but “The Mare” still contemplates the private hurts and mysterious longings lurking beneath the surface of every life.
Like her literary hero Vladimir Nabokov, Gaitskill manages intense and ambivalent emotions on the page with what she calls a “detached, aerial view.” Her sporadic jumps into the perspectives of characters other than Velvet and Ginger gives fascinating glimpses into an entire landscape of incongruous thoughts and intentions — a magic trick that could work wonders in real life.
Speaking of real life, a few years back Gaitskill published a sprawling 17,000-word essay in Granta about the heartbreak of a runaway kitten. The piece employed the pet’s ordeal to also evaluate her strained relationship with two inner-city kids that she and her ex-husband hosted every summer as part of the Fresh Air Fund. While the names and personal details may be different, you can gather that the novel’s stylized narrative rests on bedrock of genuine emotion. Even with the occasional stumbles, “The Mare” makes for such an eloquent and affecting pony show.
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