MARY GAITSKILL AND PERVERSE SENSIBILITY

Mary Gaitskill isn't kidding around. Freud's famous maxim -- the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego -- has rarely been taken to such a successful extreme by any writer of contemporary fiction. Her willingness to expose, confront, and engage the body in her swirling narrative of memory, perversion, desire, death and triumph brings in all the big themes of literature without sentimentality, and with an unfaltering quest to seek out the good, the bad, and the ugly of sexuality and our culture in a way that makes the likes of Philip Roth and John Updike seem absolutely inhibited. Again to consider Freud: The pervert does what the neurotic envies: Gaitskill's writing is pervese where Roth and Updike by comparison are neurotic. She takes it a step further while avoiding the trap of an adolescent cultivating shock value for its own sake. Gaitskill belongs to the realm of Goya, Pasolini, and Diane Arbus in her fearless willingness to delve into the taboo without judgment. She exposes excrement, sadomasochism, desperation, disease, and excavates the delicate pulsating sublime pulsating within it all.