Two Girls Fat and Thin
By Mary Gaitskill
Poseidon Press
The title of Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Two Girls Fat and Thin, is apt in several ways. Most obviously, the novel begins with the events leading up to the meeting of two women, one of whom has been a devotee of a writer who started a cult of extreme right-wing individualism, the other of whom is a freelance journalist writing a feature on the writer, now dead, an on the current status of the cult. The novel is about these two women, and is told from their points of view. Though one woman is represented by first and the other by third person narration, the latter only contains that character’s viewpoint.
The title’s reference to the characters as girls is appropriate, because a great deal of the novel is taken up by retrospective accounts of each woman’s childhood and adolescence. As they reveal to each other at their first meeting, they were both sexually abused children — Justine having been molested several times at age five by a friend of the family, and Dorothy having been forced into an incestuous affair with her father at the age of fourteen. These abuses actually take up little of the narrative, which is focused more on showing the acts as they start or perpetuate continuing and spreading cycles of violence.
Justine’s experience echoes throughout a childhood full of sadistic behaviour towards other girls coupled with masochistic surrender to teenage tough-boys. The defensive paranoia of Dorothy’s father and the meek compliance of her mother escalate throughout Dorothy’s childhood so that when the incest starts occurring it is the extension of a situation that was always inherently violent. This is not to say that the debasing attitudes the girls take towards their bodies, perceived as estranged objects capable of betraying them, stems directly and simply from the abuse they have been victims of. Justine’s fascination with fantasies of domination and submission are perpetuated by the existing social order of adolescent suburban America; the fat Dorothy is already practiced at creating fantasy worlds, based on Peter Pan and supplemented with candy, in order to escape the friendless misery of her scholastic life.
As the lives of the two women intersect, the book depicts complex and interdependent patterns of violence that are greater than the characters, who are not only trapped within but helplessly perpetuate them. The emphasis in the title on the weight of each girl is fitting for a novel in which everything from social environment and family to personal beliefs and fantasies aids the atmosphere of alienation and violence that is still centering around the women’s bodies when they meet as adults.
Even though Gaitskill tells an intense story from the point of view of her characters, her well-crafted prose is unemotional and at its most beautiful is sometimes at its most distancing. My own preference is for books that treat highly disturbing material in an unsentimental way, and I think a great deal of the power and effectiveness of the novel comes from this. However, although at times a dry humour surfaces that works well, the writing sometimes falls into a kind of flippancy which is a little jarring. For example, names in the novel are apposite to a degree that is quite funny. Justine Shade recalls de Sade, Dorothy Never refers to both Oz and Never Never Land, the writer whose books, reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s, create the cult of Definitism is Anna Granite, the town where Dorothy is repeatedly raped by her father is Painesville, Pennsylvania, and so on.
These names suggest an allegorical character that the book does not have. While a more scholarly examination of the novel might explain them in a critical context, they are hard to deal with when one is just reading it. They suggest that the characters are types, and the story is so particular and individual that this suggestion is disconcerting: this is not a didactic treatment. While the novel does contain a general premise about the nature of this kind of violence, it has a specific context, and like any good novel it does not degrade the context for the sake of the premise.
