09/27/2021
Gaitskill’s curious new project (after the novella This Is Pleasure ) looks back on four of her previous novels and a memoir, splices them with critical self-reflections, and threads the needle with a short work in progress. The slight frame story concerns a seven-year-old girl named Ginger who journeys to hell through a hole in her backyard. As she makes her way back home, she encounters nightmarish reflections, demonic strangers, and Satan himself. But the bulk of the book is excerpts from past books including Veronica (2005), about a budding fashion model, and The Mare (2015), concerning two girls who come of age in upstate New York, where one visits from Brooklyn over the years as part of the Fresh Air Fund, and ride horses together. Hence the reader has several versions of troubled suburban girlhood, haunted or abusive fathers, and barbed early friendships, bordered by long sections in which Gaitskill reflects on her use of the themes, recalls the conditions and intent behind the books’ composition, and responds to her critics. As an experiment, this doesn’t quite come together. At its best, it functions as a showcase for Gaitskill’s powerful back catalog, but more often the indulgent structure fails to hold and obscures her intent. While her insights will prove valuable to her most ardent fans, everyone else can take a pass. (Oct.)
About sex she is an especially distinctive writer. She catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called “the dirt within,” as well as any writer we have. Once you’ve read her, her little hammer continues to tap in your head.” – Dwight Garner, New York Times New York Magazine Boston Globe The Believer
2021-08-18
At the age of 7, Ginger goes to hell to steal the Devil’s treasure. Traveling down the clean, well-lit stairway in her nightie, Ginger passes scenes of degradation which draw her into their torment, lizards the size of dogs growing out of walls, and a room where all the modern conveniences of the world are running all at once. Finally, she comes to a “quiet, old-fashioned room” where the Devil sits reading a book in an armchair, behind which lies his treasure. Ginger steals the sack of treasure only to discover that now she can never put it down; that the treasure has become a part of her; that it is something she needs but does not want and that the truth it speaks is about love and pain and how they will not be separated in this life or the one beyond. In and of itself, this tale treads territory familiar to anyone versed in Gaitskill’s oeuvre: fear and desire intermingle; revulsion and fascination mirror each other. However, this project is not primarily interested in exploring Ginger’s story. Rather, the author intersperses short segments of Ginger’s tale between longer sections of previously published works, spanning from Gaitskill’s first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), through her novel in progress, End of Seasons . The manuscript is color-coded in tones of orange and red which fluctuate page by page (orange for excerpted work; red for Ginger’s story and literary commentary by the author). This creates a flickering effect evocative of the setting Ginger wanders through, an effect reinforced by Gaitskill’s original collages that recall the images hung on hell’s walls; however, the total impact of the book is hard to describe. Devotees of Gaitskill’s work are likely to appreciate the opportunity to revisit her masterworks on something of a guided tour where the author herself is able to instruct us that she is not "captivated" by cruelty, as has sometimes been said, but rather, “stunned by the omnipresence of cruelty, by the senselessness of its infliction, and at the same time by its seeming inevitability, its naturalness, its apparently primary place in our human nature.” Those new to her work would be better served to start at the beginning and work their way up to this more impressionistic construction.
The book rewards those looking for a deeper connection to Gaitskill's rigorous imagination.
Gaitskill is something special. She doesn’t grandstand; she lacks self-pity. She has an intuitive sympathy for people acting on their worst impulses and a gift for portraying cruelty without condemnation. She manages to be an erotic writer without being, precisely, a sex writer.
New York Magazine - Emily Nussbaum
About sex she is an especially distinctive writer. She catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called “the dirt within,” as well as any writer we have. Once you’ve read her, her little hammer continues to tap in your head.
New York Times - Dwight Garner
A challenging and affecting puzzle . . . In time, you come to see how everything melds together, how it all intersects . . . Everything under consideration in this unique project is somehow beautiful, even when seemingly pained. The Devil’s Treasure is an absorbing exercise — a chance to see deeply into Gaitskill’s world and, at the least, a fine introduction to her oeuvre . . . This is one book that deserves more readers.
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 . . . The method of her genius has always been radical truth-telling . . . Few people have written as well about broken, dystopian America, both urban and suburban . . . 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 . . . 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.
Compact Magazine - Valerie Stivers
The medium of collage emerged to challenge the difference between the real and the artificial. Similarly, The Devil’s Treasure draws attention to the line—increasingly blurred—between fiction and nonfiction... Gaitskill, too, likes to peer into Hell, always with the utmost empathy.
Times Literary Supplement - Mia Levitin
This superb book is for more than just super fans. Gaitskill speaks about the opposition inside us, the doubleness of human nature, and a longing for unity."
KCRW Bookworm - Michael Silverblatt
What is most amazing about Gaitskill is her ability to portray the heart of human longing and suffering, and to see in each gesture of our lives the disturbing and conflicting pool of drives that marks our every gesture.
The Believer - Sheila Heti
Gaitskill has produced a body of work so acutely observant of human behavior that it’s frequently described in the language of violation: a vivisection, a dental drill, a flogging... But the real danger is elsewhere: It’s in glances and gestures and sudden silences, in craving contact and being rebuffed... Gaitskill isn’t scary because she conjures monsters; monsters, she points out, are almost always in fashion. What makes her scary, and what makes her exciting, is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.
New York Times Magazine - Parul Sehgal
