Mary Gaitskill’s ‘The Mare’ surprises with its tenderness

Mary Gaitskill is not a cuddly, coddle-y writer. Her first short-story collection, “Bad Behavior,” introduced readers to a piercing, ruthless voice.

The stories themselves — about prostitutes, addicts, empty relationships — glitter dangerously on the page, like shards of stained glass. Her most recent novel, “Veronica,” spun its own sticky narrative threads of AIDS, sex and isolation, and earned Gaitskill a National Book Award nomination.

So it’s some surprise (though not a disappointment) that her latest novel, “The Mare,” trods a course closer to “National Velvet” than to anything she has written before.

At the heart of “The Mare” is a politically fraught relationship between Velveteen Vargas, a Dominican Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn, and Ginger Roberts, a white woman from upstate who introduces her to horse riding and a skittish mare called Fugly Girl.

In Velvet’s world, which for most of the book is her Dominican mother’s world, feeling significant is the greatest sin. “Pride is for fools and rich people,” her mother tells her, and beats it out of her with a shoe.

In Ginger’s world, the sins are different: white vanity and maternal meddling. Ginger’s husband, a college professor, grows uncomfortable with her “obsession” with Velvet, fearing she’s trying to be too much to a girl who doesn’t — can’t — need her in the same way.

It’s the kind of plot that could go pear-shaped in a hurry: Benevolent white woman rescues inner-city girl from a life of crime and poverty and sweeps her into a world of privilege.

But it’s handled by one of the few writers who could navigate that minefield of syrupy clichés and come up with something new, and honest, to say.

Much of the book’s power comes from whisper-short chapters that rotate perspectives — between Ginger and Velvet, but also among Ginger’s husband, Velvet’s mother and other peripheral characters. The multiple voices unearth entrenched layers of performance, pain and cultural misunderstanding.

Although Ginger may be closest to a “Gaitskill heroine” (a violent past, a preoccupation with power and passivity), it’s Velvet who propels us through the novel with equal parts bewildering tenderness and blistering heat.

Velvet feels perpetually ambushed by love and all of the other “snake-moving feelings of the world.” And as abusive as her mother can be, Velvet loves the anger. “It felt better than her nice,” she writes. “It was better than anything Ginger had, and what Ginger had was good.”

Later, she feels the animal threat of strange men following her home, “dark moving in dark, arms, legs, jaws” — but the fear is more vibrant to her than anything in Ginger’s world, which she sees as drawn in slight pencil.

To say Gaitskill subverts our expectations for Ginger and Velvet’s relationship is inadequate. I can think of no other living writer who so deftly feels into the corners of each of her characters’ emotions, pulling them apart with curiosity and strewing their stuttering hearts across the page.

And while the major plot arc follows a well-worn track — a hidden talent, a wild horse tamed by love, a competition that seems hopeless just until — Gaitskill draws these scenes with a precarious tilt that make them newly affecting.

Gaitskill’s prose has too often been backhanded as “cold” or “distant,” a charge seldom applied to male writers.

In many ways, “The Mare” feels like a bird-flip to those critics, a challenge Velveteen herself might applaud: You thought I was cold? Well, get a load of this.

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 2:00 AM with the headline "Mary Gaitskill’s ‘The Mare’ surprises with its tenderness."