RaveThe Georgia StraightBeauty and shit-beauty and ugliness-are not mutually exclusive in Mary Gaitskill\'s new novel, a deep-tissue-damaging chronicle of a strange friendship between a beautiful model and an unbeautiful copy editor that claws open our pretty, shiny exteriors to reveal the ugly, fetid \'hide with bristles\' lurking just beneath ... Gaitskill is a bitingly creative stylist, and similes and metaphors squirm like ticks under the grim exterior of her material ... But elegant edginess doesn\'t elbow out soulful themes of beauty and ugliness, sex and rage, guilt and redemption, and, most potently, detachment, loneliness, and the fear of terrible things \'that can\'t be said.\'
