"In this age of hyperbole, when superlatives are used so often that they have all but lost their meaning, here is a writer who actually deserves then. With her new novel, her first in a decade, Mary Gaitskill shows herself to be a accomplished and daring enough to go somewhere she has never been before. Urgent, scalding, and unexpectedly compassionate, The Mare is a revelation" Rupert Thomson
"Gaitskill embraces without reservation the tradition of the love between misunderstood horse and misunderstood child, then lets it loose in a modern, radically fraught world or gangbangers and domestic abuse. In The Mare, not just horses and girls, but also mothers and the childless are all world-weary females, abused, exhausted by life, united in their desire for safety, love, freedom and power. Gaitskill's novel is not a children's book, but it is a book about what children long for, and how we long for the same thing many years after we've left childhood behind" New York Times Book Review
"A novel about the knee-smashing effects of minority poverty and the corrosive tonic of liberal guilt... here, without a drop of condescension, is fiction that pumps blood through the cold facts of inequality" Washington Post
"Gaitskill puts raw faith, here, in the primal intimacy of a creatureliness that is common to all who love and breathe, regardless of species, race, gender, or class. Her trust in the commonality is breathtakingly vulnerable, among the greatest risks of her career" New York Times
"Gaitskill is more than a gifted story-teller. She is an enchanted, to borrow Nabokov's description of what makes a good writer a major one. The particular way in which she enchants—by putting into words the wordless undercurrent of human behaviour—is explicit in The Mare. I came away from the book not knowing whether it was happy or sad. How could a single mind ever hope to make sense of the abundant life around each moment? Which doesn't mean that real life doesn't hurt like hell. But even love wrapped in pain, when felt deeply enough, turns out to be neither love nor pain, but something else" The New Republic
"A truthful medication on the limits of birth motherhood, surrogate motherhood, and mothering yourself" Entertainment Weekly
"No writer is sharper about fickle exigencies of desire. Dominance and submission—the shifting pokes that govern all relationships, not just sexual ones—are Gaitskill's great subjects" New Yorker
"Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic—juxaposing urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, brown and white—and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting" Kirkus Reviews
"Gaitskill's prose has never been cold, that's only what it's been called; and her writing has never been about the absence of emotion so much as its unapologetic abundance. She resists sentimentality not by banishing feeling to the white margins with understatement but by granting emotion enough space to misbehave... This is what is so brave about The Mare—the way it does believe in the mess of connection, and does attempt its ragged portrait, rather than simply outlining the crystalline loneliness of disconnection. It dares us to find its sentimental—squatting inside the prefab frame of an easy redemption story—but ultimately resists sentimentality with a powerful insistence on the vexed complexities of sentiment" Leslie Jamison, Bookforum
"People in Gaitskill's work are kind and cruel, honest and deceptive, strong and weak, wrong and right at the same time. They hurt those they love; they love those that hurt them... Bracing in its rigorous truth—seeking, subtle and capacious in its moral vision, Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space" Boston Globe
"I finished The Mare on the subway yesterday and cried. There is magic in The Mare though it's unclear whether the heroine, Velveteen Vargas, can actually hear horses talking to her or whether this is her intuition or a projection of her hopeful mind and heart, and it doesn't matter which, ultimately. A lot of the book is about the distance between what we think or hope or imagine other people are thinking and feeling and their actual thoughts. No one is better that Mary Gaitskill at describing moment of being able to sense what someone else is feeling, either accurately or so close to accurately that the distance between your two consciousnesses recedes temporarily" Emily Gould
"The range of Gaitskill's humanity is astonishing and matched only, it seems, by desire to confront readers with the trembling reality of our shared ugliness" LA Times
YOU ARE READING
The Mare
General FictionGinger is in her forties and a recovering alcoholic when she meets and marries Paul. When it becomes clear it's too late for her to have a baby of her own, she tries to persuade him to consider adoption, but he already has a child from a previous ma...
