A Master Novelist Visits Hell: Valerie Stivers on Mary Gaitskill’s ‘The Devil’s Treasure’
PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
By Valerie Stivers
Originally published in Compact Magazine
The writer Mary Gaitskill’s latest book, The Devil’s Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams, was republished this month by McNally Editions, which for two years now has been reissuing modern classics. Gaitskill is an era-defining talent, one of the best American fiction writers working today, and the book is a collage of fiction, autobiography, and fairy tale that seeks, through “ordered disorder,” to approach a fundamental thing about making art—one that defines Gaitskill’s oeuvre.
To get at this elusive but essential quality, the book starts with the fairy tale that frames the other sections, in which a little girl named Ginger (also the name of the protagonist of Gaitskill’s most recent novel, The Mare) goes down to hell to “steal the devil’s treasure.” Ginger learns that she is safer if she doesn’t stop to look too closely at the goings-on of the underworld. Gaitskill follows this with a direct first-person comment in her own voice: “Oh, but I stopped to look. I always stop to look. And I often write what I see, or I try.”
“Some of her truths flout orthodoxy.”
The Devil’s Treasure was originally published in 2021 as an art-book by Ze, a small publisher run by one of Gaitskill’s friends. Since its release, Gaitskill has become a Substacker, discussing many of the things she sees more directly. She has emerged as one of the few big-name literary writers willing to discuss the topics of the new orthodoxy in their complexity—sexual assault, writing across race—despite, as she has written, being “mostly on the side” of the orthodoxy’s proponents. This is significant, because she is an establishment figure, widely respected by her peers, who in many ways has been a progenitor of today’s ideas. Sexual violence has been a perennial topic for her, and much of her work’s subtext is about trauma, recovery, and dignity for victims. However, the method of her genius has always been radical truth-telling. And some of her truths flout orthodoxy. She has said, for example, that rape is about sex and power, and that false accusations do happen. She has confessed that, as a young woman, she herself lodged such a false accusation, and that the feelings she was expressing then are relevant to today’s debate. All of this is obviously true, but these are claims that most public intellectuals in Gaitskill’s world would be afraid to touch.
Many of her more controversial statements were issued in the past, and in her Substack, she sometimes walks them back or amends them based on today’s values. Still, Gaitskill continually takes contrarian positions on contemporary topics. Her 2019 novella, This Is Pleasure, was a fictionalization of one of the larger scandals of the #MeToo era. It concerns a talented, acclaimed man whom Gaitskill considered a friend and with whom she had personal experience. Her fictionalization presents the man’s side with enough complexity that readers have been able to take it as either a vindication or a condemnation, depending on their point of view. To suggest any complexity is forbidden, and the sum effect is that students now regularly boycott her classes, and Gaitskill has developed something of a one-woman cottage industry of defending herself. Last March, she published a rewritten, more overtly political version of her story “Secretary” (adapted in the 2002 film starring James Spader and Maggie Gylenthal) in The New Yorker. The updated version deepened and clarified the message of the original text, while insisting on a more acute awareness of workplace sexual harassment than the original piece mustered.
The Devil’s Treasure represented an early stage of this mission of engagement, and its republication by culty McNally Editions seems a positive sign that both readers and imprints are in the mood for a more open discourse. The book’s McNally jacket copy calls it “an answer to Gaitskill’s critics and, simultaneously, the best book we have about contemporary fiction, the forces ranged against it, and the forces that bring it into being.” In it, Gaitskill combines excerpts from her published fiction with autobiographical sections discussing the meaning and thinking behind the work, all framed by the fairy tale.
The novel-excerpts convey her central talent of extreme truth-telling about the human psyche and her willingness to go to awful places in search of it. In an excerpt from Two Girls Fat and Thin, protagonist Dorothy Never is sexually molested by her father, an event Gaitskill describes in graphic detail, including the disturbing acknowledgement that at the first sign of her father’s attentions, Dorothy is aroused and finds tenderness. To depict such a thing is almost unspeakably transgressive, even as it is a popular scenario in pornography. For either reason, few writers would dare to put it on the page. Yet Dorothy’s arousal highlights the true horror of the father’s actions—the magnitude of her trust, the scale of his betrayal, the power of sexual touch in any form.
Gaitskill’s case for being allowed to write such things is personal as well as aesthetic. In one of The Devil’s Treasure’s autobiographical sections, she writes that she was sexually molested by a family friend when she was 5. Recalling this formative trauma, she says she was “mesmerized” by what she saw happening in her molester’s face: a transformation from an ordinary person into “a creature consumed by hunger and shame and pain that drove him to do what he did, to act itself out on my body, my mind, everything in me that might feel.” The experience shaped Gaitskill’s work, in the sense that she became aware of the “chasm between the normal face and the other face,” and understood that “in that chasm anything might happen.” All the abuse in her work—perpetrated by cruel children, dysfunctional families, predatory employers, sadomasochistic boyfriends—takes place in this liminal space, and it has always been her characters’ project to escape it and heal from it.
To do so, they must first acknowledge that it has shaped them and name its effects. Gaitskill writes: “However horrifying cruelty is to you, if you are exposed to enough of it … it can become a mesmerizing hugeness that you will strive to physically and psychically accommodate, no matter how you must distort yourself in the process, in order not to be destroyed by it.” In the superstructure of The Devil’s Treasure, the little girl decides to go to hell when she sees an alluring cartoon of the devil laughing, while “demons poked dancing people in the behind with pitchforks.” She observes, “It did not look like torture. It looked scary but interesting too.” This is a distorted view, but it is hers. Trusting herself enough to follow her own instincts is the first step to healing. There are more steps—Gaitskill also emphasizes the full arc of rebuilding trust and forming relationships. But it all begins with the mission down to hell, where the heroine discovers, “I wasn’t trying to steal at all. I was trying to take back something that had been stolen from me: my sexuality, my core nature, what I was born to be.” The “devil’s treasure” is the damaged inner self, and Gaitskill’s fiction has always sought after it.
As a side note, Gaitskill has been a pioneering writer on sadomasochism, another sort of visit to hell that finds a similar redemption. Characters like the young woman in “Secretary” or Justine Shade, the other protagonist from Two Girls Fat and Thin, have sexual experiences that appear to be—and are—degrading and awful for them but which are also to some extent desired and chosen. These experiences might not be generative or healing in themselves—unlike today’s sex-positive version of BDSM, Gaitskill’s encounters are questionably consensual and truly transgressive—but they reveal her protagonists’ willingness to meet themselves where they are, and to engage in combat with the forces of darkness. Gaitskill writes: “This circumstance is crippling. This circumstance is treasure. This circumstance just is.”
To complete the healing arc, as Gaitskill defines it, her characters must struggle not just to know themselves, but to connect with others. The Devil’s Treasure’s penultimate sections take excerpts from her most recent novel, The Mare, in which a lonely, middle-aged white woman without children of her own attempts to mother two Dominican children she meets through the Fresh Air Fund. This, too, is somewhat autobiographical and reflects a relationship in Gaitskill’s own life. In the novel, the woman’s search for connection is imperfect but vital, as was also true for Gaitskill. Its points of view alternate between those of the white woman and her husband and the Dominican girl and her mother, violating the current proscriptions of writing across race—or of anyone writing widely outside personal experience. Gaitskill addresses this in The Devil’s Treasure, acknowledging her limitations in writing such characters and, at the same time, defending the value in doing so.
The excerpts from The Mare are less effective than the author’s other work. The Dominican girl’s sections don’t have the ring of unblinking truth we have come to expect. And Gaitskill’s guilty-white-woman self-examination isn’t surprising the way her best work is. (“Ginger could be nice because people like her got other people to do the violence for them,” a character observes.) Nonetheless, considering Gaitskill’s strongest work, it’s hard to argue with The Devil’s Treasure’s impassioned plea for the value of truth-telling in art.
Few people have written as well about broken, dystopian America, both urban and suburban. Her characters are sex workers or drug addicts. They have timid or stunted personalities. They come from dysfunctional families. They are survivors of sexual abuse. Their lives are landscapes of alienation and emotional impoverishment. Ugly things are done to Gaitskill’s characters, and they do ugly things in return, all rendered in language that is continually fresh, startling, precise. Gaitskill has been accused of cruelty (notably by the writer Maggie Nelson in the 2011 book The Art of Cruelty, a characterization Gaitskill vehemently refutes in The Devil’s Treasure). The sum of Gaitskill’s work is the opposite of cruel. Her form of radical truth-telling recovers her characters’ shattered dignity. This mechanism—or mysticism, or alchemy—is the essence of art, and makes the best argument that we ought to place no limits on it.
Valerie Stivers, a Compact columnist, cooks from literature for The Paris Review.