This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill review – pitch perfect response to #MeToo

The American writer’s extraordinary novella tells the story of one man’s fall from grace with real nerve

Ostensibly, it seems quite shameless of Serpent’s Tail to have put Mary Gaitskill’s This Is Pleasure between hard covers. Her novella runs to a mere 84 tiny pages, each one printed in a typeface so large, the middle-aged will not even need to put on their glasses to read it; the story has, moreover, already appeared in its entirety in the New Yorker. But, in the present moment, this is an incendiary volume. Having read it twice, I’ve come to feel that Gaitskill’s immaculate words demand such a protective casing – though I could probably have done without the pouting lipstick kisses that adorn it.

This Is Pleasure is a response to #MeToo. Specifically, it would appear to be a response to the Google spreadsheet called Shitty Media Men (a list of allegations about various individuals in American publishing) that circulated on the internet in 2017. The tale is told, in alternate chapters, by two old friends, Margot and Quin. Both are married, middle-aged and work in publishing: Margot, who is American, is best known as the editor of a notorious collection of stories about masochistic women; Quin, an English dandy in New York, oversees an eclectic list of authors to whom he is uncommonly devoted.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31QxkNX