By reputation, Mary Gaitskill is a writer not only immune to sentiment but actively engaged in deep, witchy communion with the perverse...No writer is sharper about the fickle exigencies of desire. Dominance and submission—the shifting poles that govern all relationships, not just sexual ones—are Gaitskill’s great subjects...One such child is Velveteen Vargas, called Velvet, who appears in Gaitskill’s new novel, “The Mare” (Pantheon). When the book opens, Velvet is eleven....Their greatest power struggle takes place around the question of horses. As soon as Velvet begins to take riding lessons, it’s clear that she’s a natural equestrian. Silvia is sure that she’ll fall and kill herself, and refuses to grant permission for her to ride; Ginger, delighting in Velvet’s skill and the transformative potential of her obvious excellence, secretly overrules her.

Gaitskill’s extraordinary, subtle rendering of the complex physical and spiritual pulse among these people tenuously yoked together by liberal ideals touches, obviously, on tricky questions of class and race. She pushes that edge by taking on not only Velvet’s point of view, but also her abusive mother’s, and by going deeply into Velvet’s world at home, her life at school, her growing interest in the boys in her neighborhood. Now and then, things get dodgy. While I could accept that Velvet’s mother, out of rage, internalized misogyny and a twisted form of protectiveness, beats her daughter and wildly favors her son... People, in this book, lie to one another and to themselves in what they say and do, but their bodies are exquisitely sensitive instruments for experiencing the true, secret, unnameable lives of others. .. People, in this book, lie to one another and to themselves in what they say and do, but their bodies are exquisitely sensitive instruments for experiencing the true, secret, unnameable lives of others. Gaitskill delivers this visceral moment, and others like it, with full knowledge that embraces can be rough, and the people offering them are nearly always flawed, vulnerable and scarred. And yet, she insists in this magnificently hopeful novel. And yet.

The Mare, too, thrives on the idea and the actuality of social collision; what it represents to us in terms of a radical challenge to the deeply embedded stratification of haves and have-nots, and how it is experienced by complex, damaged, frail, angry and desiring human beings. What lies, asks Gaitskill, in the gap between the theory and the reality?... At a crudely superficial level, everyone in The Mare behaves true to type; it is in its more subterranean depths that the mystery of attachment begins to show itself. Gaitskill is a writer who situates herself in a version of reality, and then studs it with the portents and symbols of the unconscious; the tiny box of found objects, including a broken doll that looks like Ginger, that Velvet keeps close; the news reports from the Iraq war that float from the car radio into Ginger’s agitated brain. And while The Mare is not perfect – sustaining a child’s voice is near-impossible, and the book’s adherence to an unfolding temporal narrative means that it lapses into episodic repetitiveness – it is bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling.