This Is Pleasure

To say that Mary Gaitskill is the ideal author to translate the #MeToo movement into fiction doesn't really do justice to the subtlety of her work, or the complexity of the movement. But nevertheless, when her novella This Is Pleasure appeared on the New Yorker website this summer (now it's a book too), there was a palpable level of excitement: she has been detailing the brutal and tender relations of sex, power, and desire since her first collection, Bad Behavior. The new story is just what you might hope for: a dialogue, both cutting and sympathetic, about a somewhat disgraced, somewhat bad-behaving man that imagines the desiring, power-playing women and men of her earlier stories transported into our changing times.