There’s room to feel sympathy with the flamboyant, roguish Q, and some readers will; it’s an astonishingly humane characterization, articulated within mutable social dynamics. But more urgently, we are primed to penetrate Q’s defenses and misogyny, primed for penitence. Here, Gaitskill nails one of the most disempowering and frustrating aspects of the recent sexual offences shakedown: the frequently unrewarded desire for enlightenment and apology, and genuine reformation of perpetrators ... There are no easy answers or safe moral stations within the book. The two narratives converse, diverge, agree and disagree, brilliantly covering this hotly debated terrain. In fewer than 100 pages, Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account ... This is Pleasure sensitively and confidently holds its fury, momentum, contrary forces and imperfect humanity within a perfect frame.
... its slimness belies its incendiary content ... Gaitskill uncannily captures Quin’s intoxicating mixture of brashness and tenderness, performative wit and flair and haunting vulnerability ... That the story is narrated by a 'perpetrator' (Quin) and an 'apologist' (Margot) makes This Is Pleasure a very risky endeavorto reduce an enigmatic and ambiguous story to a castigatory epithet is to miss the point of Gaitskill’s fiction ... one of our greatest living writers brings to the most inflammatory of topics nuance, subtlety, and a capacious humanity that grants mercy even as it never excuses.
The story is typical of Gaitskill in that it explores a familiar, even clichéd situation, only to subvert our expectations. The story is not one of justice served, nor is it one of justice miscarried. Instead, it is a story about how loneliness can deform a person, even one who seems to have so much going for him. The story doesn’t excuse Quin’s behavior, but in recognizing his flaws, it doesn’t outright condemn it, either. Instead, it asks us to see Quin for who he is—eager, erring, lonely, a creep and a bad guy who probably deserves to lose his job but not his humanity—and it also asks us to try to recognize what we might share with him, what might cause us to behave badly. If this story of sexual misconduct refuses easy resolutions, it also offers something more sustaining: a recognition of the loneliness plaguing each of us and a suggestion for how the damaged among us might possibly be redeemed ... This Is Pleasure is confounding in part because it seems more interested in examining Quin’s inner life than it does in judging his behavior. The story does not deny his culpability and acknowledges that the loss of his job fits his crimes. But through the character of Margot, Quin is seen as not so much evil or tragic but pitiful ... Gaitskill, while deeply moral, is not a moralist. Whereas others might only judge, she attends, as artists are meant to do. By offering us a portrait of ourselves, lonely and uncertain and vulnerable, she finds that miracles occur: rapprochement and forgiveness, sudden kinds of intimacy and, if not love, then recognition.
This Is Pleasure, by Mary Gaitskill, a volume the size of a large cellphone or a slender gift book, seems perfectly poised to stir up a ruckus ... its content marks a transition in cultural mores, as it is a sympathetic fictional portrait, created by a woman, of a man who has been charged with #MeToo violations ... Mary Gaitskill...practically invented female sexual agency in her 1988 debut collection, Bad Behavior, with its grad student prostitutes and moody sadomasochism, is just the person to take on the task of questioning #MeToo’s harasser vs. victim scenarios in a fictional context ... Gaitskill’s book arrives as some women writers have begun to open the possibility of a #MeToo course correction — one that allows for a more nuanced look at sexual trespasses ... Whether you agree or disagree, it is time to have these conversations, to explore the nuances, to decide whether we have gone too far. Maybe that’s why This Is Pleasure has been packaged as a gift book. Give it to someone you want to talk to.
...in the present moment, this is an incendiary volume ... Nothing in This Is Pleasure, however, is clear cut. If Gaitskill’s narrative is dextrous, taut and pertly sexy, it is also ambivalent, hell bent on a certain kind of obfuscation ... Gaitskill isn’t in the business of exonerating Quin. Nor is Margot simply a walking, talking embodiment of internalised sexism. If he has done things wrong, her grief and confusion aren’t misplaced. No, Gaitskill’s real interest lies in matters that can hardly be spoken at this point: things that even her characters struggle to articulate ... What do we want, and why? What happens when we are attracted by – when we really long for – things that we are told are off-limits, disgusting, unacceptable? Do people always mean what they say? At the heart of this extraordinary, daring, provocative, pitch perfect story lies the idea that, sometimes, we act out a truth, only to run from it. The sensible among us know that the running is true, too, and that between these two realities lies a world of pleasure and then, abruptly, pain.
... a little novella that gets deep under your skin. At 96 pages, it is an exquisitely compressed, morally tangly saga about a charming, middle-aged book publisher who is accused of workplace harassment ... Gaitskill is uniquely attuned to the moment. The literary laureate of inappropriate kinky practices, she writes fiction that militates against easy answers ... Gaitskill writes in clean, rigorous prose but builds in tripwires that keep the reader guessing where her sympathies might lie. There’s always a rub — and usually a pinch and a slap, too. The second time I read the story, I spotted more subtle ways in which Quin exploits his power, but Gaitskill shows compassion, suggesting that he is targeted because the real predators can evade capture.
Gaitskill makes readers feel for characters they maybe otherwise wouldn’t. Because the novella isn’t about the accusers so much as it is about the people surrounding the accused, This is Pleasure is a subtle and honest account of muddled empathies and radical compassion, and asks of readers: What can we forgive? What should we forgive? And, how should we forgive? ... Gaitskill presents a complicated situation, and asks readers not to read through an ideological lens but instead through an empathetic and compassionate one.
In her new stand-alone story, Mary Gaitskill is not so much hostile to ideology as impervious to it. For Gaitskill, reducing the complexity of situation or character in order to make a point is the job of a propagandist, not a writer. The qualities that make This Is Pleasure maddening — the feeling that the ground is constantly shifting beneath your feet, that the writer provides information that forces you to continually revise your views of the two characters telling the story — are the very things that mean Gaitskill is doing her job. They may also be the very thing that partisans on both sides of #MeToo, the subject of the story, will find intolerable ... Gaitskill is writing here beyond the hardened either-or parameters into which the public discussion of these issues has settled into post-Weinstein. That does not mean that the critic who admires Gaitskill’s choice is free to ignore the terms in which her book will be received and likely discussed. It demands we recognize that a writer refusing to accede to these terms is one who’s taking a chance ... simply by acting like a novelist in a time that encourages pamphleteering, Mary Gaitskill has acted bravely.
In her novels, essays, and short stories...Gaitskill ...frequently explores the shaded contours and subtle seesaws of sexual power dynamics and conjures complex characters that resist our urge to fit them into delineated categories of morality and culpability ... Gaitskill provides room for readers to disagree, ultimately raising more questions than answers ... In this novella, Gaitskill reveals two truths—Quin’s and Margot’s—and reminds us that the truth can be painfully elusive ... Gaitskill’s willingness to ignore common wisdom and consider controversial and complex questions from different viewpoints is a true literary pleasure.
