A Question of Intent

...He emphasized these last three words as though they were steel jaws closing on the horrified face of a victim who has realized too late the trap he's been sitting in...

...Not so in this book...

...Madison Smartt Bell, an astute observer of the current literary scene (and an important part of it), reserved the harshest words of his Boston Globe review for the works of Ayn Rand...

...Although thin and pretty, she has a lot in common with her respondent—more, in fact, than she knows...

...In each case the initial incidents are effectively portrayed...

...Review described Gaitskill's prose as "deftly metaphoric...

...The arty New Yorkers who populated her debut short story collection were as seedy and selfish as usual, but the meticulous rendering of their inner lives gave them an oddly appealing kinkiness and self-loathing that was fresh and memorable...

...Did the praise go to the author's head...

...Oddly, however, Two Girls has been widely and respectfully reviewed...

...A notice on her local laundromat's bulletin board expressing interest in followers of author Anna Granite stirs in Dorothy memories of the highlight of her otherwise unhappy life...

...An error of exuberance...

...Itispossible that the problems with this first novel started then...

...The tale takes place in contemporary New York City...

...Gaitskill's matter-of-fact tone and the mute stolidity of the girls as they submit are chilling...

...Has Gaitskill purposely written abad novel to parody a bad writer...

...Gaitskill, Danto declared, "skillfully sets up parallel narratives," and her prose has a "fine storyteller's pace and brilliant metaphors...

...Gaitskill drops the largely unadorned style of her short fiction for a densely metaphoric prose, and eschews the subtle manipulation of narrative time that seemed so effortless in such stories as "An Affair, Edited" and "Connection...

...Someone suffers an "unhappy loss of confidence...

...Granite (read Ayn Rand), the leader of the Defrnitistmovement, had briefly acted as Dorothy's mentor, exposing her firsthand to the workings of an intellectual organization whose tenets resembled a kind of ecstatic social Darwinism and held that the fittest experienced life more fully than everyone else...

...Protagonist number one is Dorothy Footie, obese and isolated, who commutes from Queens to Manhattan where she is a night shift proofreader at a law firm...

...During her golden period Dorothy even managed to have a brief affair with a tall, handsome man...

...While he thought "the coming together of Dorothy and Justine unlikely," he was persuaded by Gaitskill's "consummate authority...

...D'Erasmo did consider the novel "technically messy," but she was more concerned with the implications of what had been written than with the writing itself...

...Unless, of course, it's all intentional...

...TwoGirls is clumsily constructed and not particularly well written...

...The idea backfires, and the boyfriend is the one disgraced...

...We are brought up to date in the third and final part of the book, when Justine writes and publishes her article...

...An intriguing notion...

...Characters often divine other characters' thoughts, feelings and histories: A boyfriend tells Justine, "You're like one of those little monsters who tortures other kids in the playground," which she was...

...But on the whole, she said, the book is "deliberately overblown and demanding...

...Although certain passages are perhaps meant to poke fun at trashy writers ("I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit"), others seem simply careless...

...jumping in the air like a jackknife to slam the volleyball...

...Moreover, the promise shown in her first book has earned Gaitskill sufficient grace, it seems to me, to permit us to overlook a disappointing novel...

...Indeed, a few sentences entirely resist comprehension: "But I also sensed actual interest and liking waiting for me to show myself...

...Both women have been sexually abused as children, Dorothy by her father, Justine by a friend of her family...

...The boyfriend opens the door for Dorothy, hoping to humiliate Justine further by letting someone else see what she is doing...

...Still, the book was overpraised—a not uncommon phenomenon—and its author's name was too hastily added to the long list of brilliant young writers of the 1980s...

...That a young writer should produce clunky, improbable comparisons is not terribly surprising...

...Justine believed teachers to be secretly on their side as they trampled the weak and the uncool, people adults have to accept, and, as a result, become like...

...Stacey D'Erasmo, in the Village Voice, concentrated on the social issues raised by Gaitskill...

...There was forewarning: Bad Behavior was not without flaws...

...thin Justine becomes by turn sadistic and masochistic...

...Justine Shade, protagonist number two, posted the note...

...She cannot resist responding to the note...

...Yet it is not enough...

...A good deal of backtracking also is necessary as the narrative shifts from one voice to the other...

...Fat Dorothy is made all the more miserable...

...contributor, "The Quarterly," "Massachusetts Review," "Newsday" Mary Gaitskill managed, in Bad Behavior, to put a new spin on old material...

...Instead, she uses the flimsy pretext of one character's desire to confide in the other to move from present to past...

...I felt her smile inwardly," Dorothy thinks of Justine, and, a semicolon later, Justine's trembling stops...

...The perspectives are equally narrow, the prose similarly pitched...

...She found "moments of brooding, powerful description" and other strengths, including, at one point, "an appropriate tone of cool deliberation...

...Outraged by its critical stance, Dorothy gets Justine's address and heads over for a confrontation...

...Who, after all, would have the courage to knowingly write a bad first novel...

...He summoned Alistair, who smiled paternally at her as if delighted to be watching an actual pick-up...

...Nevertheless, Ginger Danto in the New York Times Book...

...Gaitskill shows herself once again to be fearless in illuminating aspects of sexuality that are normally kept in the dark...

...Danto worried that maybe Gaitskill had "sought to fill her novel with everything her short stories left out...

...For no clear reason, Gaitskill has chosen to alternate between Dorothy's first person account of her life and a third person version of Justine's...

...The abrupt, awkward shifts from first to third person are the least of the novel's failings...

...Here are a few examples of that supposed skill: "The voices of the neighborhood children, hard and bounding as dense rubber balls, cut into my frail sphere...

...Following a short opening section that describes Dorothy and Justine's meeting, we dive into part two, which recounts the characters' childhoods and provides some powerful moments...

...if accurate, Gaitskill may be as talented as the reviewers of her short story collection claimed she was, and braver than they could have imagined...

...Possibly, yet one of overconfidence, too...

...She writes at length and in detail about her protagonists' exploration of their bodies...

...Meg Wolitzer, in the Washington Post, took the most interesting slant...

...The difference is that such errors were rare—and of a mild sort: You got the picture, even when the words put it slightly out of focus...

...She is a freelance journalist writing an article on the moribund Definitisi group...

...Wolitzer did not go quite that far...

...Dorothy dispatches him, and tells Justine what she thinks of the article...

...The emotions and experiences shared by the women are largely the point of the events in the book's 304 pages...

...In that case, I take my hat off to Mary Gaitskill—and wonder what made her think Ayn Rand was worth the trouble in the first place...

...Two Girls, Fat and Thin is puzzling...

...Gaitskill sometimes omits punctuation ("this was not after all, a fantasy or TV show, even if it felt like it") and, more commonly, exercises questionable word choice: "She rushed her tone...

...She is explicit in describing their encounters with men and candid about the feelings those meetings arouse— dread, panic, revulsion and, on rare occasion, pleasure...

...Then the two women lie down together, calmed, comforted and—who knows—soon to become good friends...

...I think Gaitskill would, but I do not think she has...

...She saw Two Girlsas "a ferocious sendup of Ayn Rand, and, we are meant to presume, Anna Granite...

...And a "quiet highway" described in one sentence is the source, two sentences later, of the "continuous noise of cars driving by at roughly the same speed...

...The piece quoted above appeared on the Times Book Review front page, and, where it ventured beyond plot summary, was essentially positive...

...Glenda oscillated the radio dial" (Italics mine, M.K...

...Justine happens to be in the middle of a brutal tryst with a new boyfriend, who, having strapped her to the bed, has been choking her and pouring vodka down her throat...

...A woman, picturing herself spying on her lover, thinks of "scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade...