"What is in the bag behind the Devil's chair? Knowledge of some kind?
Surely something a little girl did not know should be left alone. I've
been criticized-- and sometimes admired--for what some readers see as my
affinity with cruelty, both in my depictions of it and my supposed
infliction of it on characters."
In The Devil's Treasure--aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and
Dreams--the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical
hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that
transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in
progress), interspersed with and thematically linked by a single short
story, then woven together with the author's commentary, is a kind of
director's cut revealing the personal and societal forces that inform
each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of
core human emotions and experience, the ideally, sometimes quixotically
high and grossly, confusedly low. With the stylistic daring and
preternatural acuity that has made her one of America's most original
writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that
simultaneously blends the huge prehistoric creatures that swim at the
bottom of our collective ocean with a family that picnics on the beach
while a podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious
child explores the lapping waves.
