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Title: An impressionistic portrait of despair
Review: I came to this book with a lot of excitement. It has been so well reviewed, and I've liked Mary Gaitskill's previous works. But this book disgusted and frightened me. It must be one of those critical darlings that repel the casual reader. It isn't that I'm not interested in prose poetry, which this, at times, becomes. It is that I can't stand sloppy sad prose poetry. Impressionistic prose on the subject of violence and despair and cruelty and wasted life is unbearable to me. This is a portrait of a woman with a moral disease. A disease of the consciousness. And the prose takes you right into her interiority, a mute place that lacks insight into anything but the force of despair and terror on the surface of things. Maybe it is a social comment, but I couldn't stand the sensibility and, in fact, I didn't really connect with the most poetic or "original" parts at all. This book gave me the creeps.
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