themselves, one may find the title of the story “The Agonized Face” predictable and inevitable. Here, the unhappy women who seem to be Gaitskill’s obsessive focus are closer to her own persona as a writer and commentator on contemporary society. The divorced mother of a ten-year-old girl, the narrator has been assigned to write a piece on a feminist author who is giving a talk at an annual literary festival.

The author at the festival, who was once a prostitute, has described prostitutes as feminist fighters against patriarchy. She talks about how she has been treated unfairly by the media, insisting thatalthough she can understand that it is exciting to imagine eccentric writers engaging in outlandish behaviorshe is not such a person. She complains that, by isolating qualities that seem exciting and scary and projecting them onto public figures, media consumers deny those figures’ humanity and cheat themselves of life’s complexity. One wonders if this speech is a reference to the initial public interest in Gaitskill’s work after the publication of Bad Behavior created a great deal of publicity based on her prior career as a stripper. (When an interviewer asked Gaitskill if she had ever turned a trick, she replied without hesitation that she had, earning herself a reputation that she has perhaps since regretted.)

Much of “The Agonized Face” reads like a personal essay. It raises the issue of the relationship of feminism to sexuality, pondering whether feminists who celebrate female sexuality have made young women promiscuous or whether feminists who attack traditional patriarchal sex roles have convinced those same young women that there is little or no difference between consensual sex and rape. Various images of Gaitskill’s own persona crop up in the story. For example, when the narrator recounts interviewing a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her eyes who refers to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, one may be tempted to look at the author photo on the jacket cover of Don’t Cry, in which Gaitskill stares out at her readers both defensively and belligerently.

Recalling another story she once wrote about a television talk show that depicted stories of rape victims, the narrator wonders if the feminist author was suggesting that rape and being a prostitute are the same thing, concluding, in her essayistic tone, that for the purposes of her “discussion,” they are close enough. The article the narrator finally writes takes the feminist writer to task for pretending that female humiliation is an especially smart kind of game and for casually mentioning her experience with prostitution while leaving out the “agonized face” of women’s humiliation in modern society. In her article, she metaphorically chases the author down an alley, to stone her and force her to show the face that she denies. She insists that the “agonized face” is one of the few mysteries left to women and must be protected.

One of the humiliations of women is suggested in “Mirror Ball,” a self-indulgent grotesque fairytale about a man who, by having sex with a woman and then failing to call her later, “takes her soul.” The man, a musician, picks the young woman up with the line that her eyes remind him of a mirror ball in the window of a vintage record store that flashes over the whole street at night. When he does not call her, she tries to feel contempt for him, but she feels that she loves him; that, by having sex with him, she has degraded them both; and that she will never see him again. The story continually recites the woman’s feelings of humiliation, pain, anger and fear. However, it does so in pretentious, ponderous language about the loss of her “soul” and the “window of her heart.”

One of the more structurally complex stories in the collection is “The Arms and Legs of the Lake.” The narrative shifts back and forth between the points of view of several strangers on the same train, including a young man who has just returned from Iraq, another veteran who returned six months earlier, a woman who edits a women’s magazine and has been critical of the war, and the conductor of the train. As in many of Gaitskill’s stories, the focus is more on the static ensemble of characters than it is on plot or thematic significance.

The collection’s title story focuses on a woman whose husband died six months earlier. She accompanies a friend to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to adopt a baby outside formal adoption channels. The two women battle the daunting bureaucracy of trying to arrange an independent adoption in the midst of revolution and political upheaval, as the narrator mourns the loss of her husband.

The most experimental story in the book, a story that reads more as an essayistic exploration of connections than as a narrative, is “Folk Song,” which creates links between newspaper stories about a sadistic killer, a pair of turtles stolen from a zoo, and a woman who says she is going to have sex with a thousand men, one after another. Meditating on how loathsome it is to turn a sadistic murderer into entertainment, yet how irresistible it is to readers, Gaitskill seems to reveal one of the central aspects of her fictionthe morbid fascination people feel at the horrors that sometimes confront them. Even though those who disapprove of torture, she suggests, cannot resist scanning a newspaper story for descriptions of it.

One of the shortest stories in the collection, and in many ways one of the most affecting, is “The Little Boy,” which focuses on a woman returning home after visiting her forty-two-year-old daughter. While waiting for her airplane, she becomes fascinated with a small boy accompanied by his mother. The woman recollects episodes of cruelty in her life, such as when her sisters would go to places where there were ugly people simply to make fun of them and when her grandfather killed kittens by putting them in a bag and slamming them against a wall. She is especially tortured by memories of her husband and his bouts with suicidal depression and violence, and she tries to find some hope and reassurance in the little boy.

When the boy’s mother asks the protagonist to watch him for a few minutes while she checks on her flight, the boy says he has heard her talking to herself in one of the airport corridors. When she tells him she talks to someone she used to love, he says he talks to his father, who is fighting in Iraq. However, when the mother returns, she says she does not have a husband. The woman is encouraged by a boy so full of hope that he makes up a father of whom he can be proud. The story ends with some promise that the woman can reconcile her ambiguous feelings about her abusive husband and her painful relationships with her daughters. In contrast to all the young women in this collection who complain and assign blame to others, this one older woman closes her eyes and remembers her daughter’s good night kiss, dreaming a dream that began with that kiss.

Gaitskill writes for a serious literary audience, rather than for the more casual consumers of so-called chick lit, and she strives to confront issues of concern to contemporary readers. However, her focus on unhappy women who cannot seem to find either fulfillment or hope for the future, combined with her didacticism and discursive style, sometimes make her fiction unpleasant and unrewarding to read.