A Book a Day: Mary Gaitskill: Bad Behavior

Original language: English
Original title: Bad behavior.
Translation: Maria Fadella
Year of publication: 1988
Valuation: highly recommended

There may be a specific term for those of us who tend to compulsively browse every list that comes our way. I remember having reviewed, a long time ago, a book specialized in absurd lists, a literary artifact that of course I fell in love with. But lists (one from this blog is usually published punctually around these dates) are usually a useful resource for things that you may have overlooked to come to mind or simply pay attention to them for the first time. This is the case, I didn’t even know of the existence of this writer from Kentucky (USA) and it turns out that this Misbehavior It is a book that appears on one of those lists (like all of them, obvious or pretentious or both at the same time) of some North American media, small for self-referential marketing, of course. But I find it curious that Random House will publish its translation in 2023 and that is already beginning to overexcite my curiosity.
Then, after reading the stories, something begins to add up to me: Secretaryone of them, was the subject of a film adaptation in a somewhat disturbing film (and which I don’t think I finished) starring Maggie Gyllenhall.

The back cover explains that this is the author’s debut and describes it as “a sharp and fun book of stories, loaded with eroticism.” Well, in these matters I have to say that the thirty-six years that have passed since its publication are terribly disproportionate to the current times. Through the Internet, for better or worse, and psychologists and behavioral researchers only corroborate it, the ease of access to all kinds of sexual content has displaced the term eroticism to a section bordering on the endearing and even the naive. We are in the era of explicit sex, without any intention of expressing myself for or against it, I think ignoring that is unrealistic. A question that does not take away an iota of literary merit from these stories, which deal from different perspectives with some strange forms of personal relationships, and which present, some of them, specific coincidences that could make us think of a very subtle common plot line. We are talking about prostitutes and their clients, often teenagers or young people who resort to it to survive, waiting for better opportunities or, in certain cold confessions, as just another work activity. Of his clients, of the diversity of treatment, of how their loneliness from different angles converge, of gray, sordid levels of perversion from which a certain humanity strives to emerge. There is sex and there are addictions and the ghost of AIDS runs through some story and contextualizes it in its time. It is precisely surprising to know that the self-confidence with which the author treated sexual relations represented a novelty at the time, another sign, fortunately, of progress in gender situations, since today this issue would not affect its assessment.