Nom de Plume

Or, An Alternate, and Possibly Very Shallow, Way of Reviewing Books

To me, this is the photo of a woman who takes herself very seriously. She seems to set herself apart: her shoulders are stiff; her mouth set in a firm line. “I am serious,” she seems to say. “I am wise.” Her eyes are wide open, yet not particularly candid; they seem somewhat hostile to me. There is a barrier. She does not want to be known.

This is a photo of author Mary Gaitskill, whose novel Two Girls Fat and Thin I read several years ago (lying in a bathtub in a rental house on the Oregon Coast, trying to warm up after three hours boogie boarding). It was okay, a little pretentiously intellectual. She is also the author of Veronica: A Novel, which I put on hold and tried to slog through over the weekend.

And you know what? Every single thing I hated about the book (I only managed to get to page 27) can be seen in her author photo. Of being completely inaccessible. Of being separate, better than, and completely offputting. Her prose is muscular and acrobatic, seemingly for its own sake. As a writer, she is not with the reader; she is against us. And she wants us to know it. Her mystique is more important than her writing.

This photo is something else entirely. To me, this is a woman (beauty notwithstanding) with eyes who have seen too much but is still kind. “This is who I am,” she seems to say. “I am here. I am present.” She seems candid, at ease with her flaws. She seems interesting.

Then again, I confess a partiality to Kathryn Harrison. I have read everything she has written, and my perceptions of her photos are probably influenced by the fact that I have read her personal nonfiction. But I also have to say that I read Envy yesterday, and it was amazing. The prose was gorgeous. There was one paragraph — the beginning of a chapter that was perfectly placed — that I kept rereading just for the imagery:

On Little Squam Lake, in New Hampshire: a shingled summer cottage at the bottom of a track through the woods, a steep incline that made it impossible to walk toward the front door, especially if you were carrying someting heavy, a suitcase or a bag of groceries. Gravity pulled you into a run, flung you at the house, which was long and low and filled with liquid green light, sun reflected off water and filtered through trees in lush, midsummer leaf. They’d rented in for a month, sight unseen, through one of those miniscule ads in the back pages of The New Yorker.