This Is Pleasure

A Story

By: Mary Gaitskill

Narrated by: Nan McNamara, Ralph Lister

Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident.

The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable.

Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Timely for the Me Too movement, but ...

Sigh. Not what I expected, although the narration is very good. I'm just sick of the national Witch Hunt against men over years-old, "maybe" harrassment offenses.

no surprises, nothing subversive

A sympathetic, self pitying novella that reads like every op ed crying about Me Too. Gaitskill manages to do a sloppy paint by numbers of the predator defense we all have heard before. There is nothing insightful or subversive here.