A Walk in the Dark

Like all underground art movements, the world of "transgressive fiction" comes with a built-in defense against critical scrutiny. If you appear not to dig the genre—defined by alienated characters who often turn to the lurid comforts of weird sex, hard drugs or violence—then you might as well have joined up with the mainstream that oppresses those protagonists. But when an author executes the transgressive form well, it's worth not only celebrating, but also rescuing that book from association with sloppy, shock-happy prose. As an established literary figure with one foot in the muck, Mary Gaitskill has never shied away from the dark, kinky stuff. Her 1988 debut collection of stories, "Bad Behavior," featured the tale of an employee who consents to domination at the hands of her boss. When that story was turned into the R-rated indie film "Secretary," Gaitskill called it "the 'Pretty Woman' version" of her narrative, and she was right. Complicated, damaged friendships between adult women is also a recurring theme: "Two Girls, Fat and Thin" charts the strange connection between an S&M enthusiast and a follower of an Ayn Rand–like sect. Her most recent novel, "Veronica," takes the friendship between an ex-model who contracts hepatitis C and a woman who ultimately dies from AIDS and puts it through the acid wash of memory. You know, feel-good literature.

Yet Gaitskill is always gilding these soon-to-be corpses with evocative yet efficient descriptions that remind you why you read in the first place. In "Folk Song," a story from Gaitskill's new collection, "Don't Cry," the pain of an elderly woman who goes on a talk show to confront her granddaughter's murderer is rendered this way: "You picture the grandmother's gentle wrinkled chest, a thick strip of flesh pulled away to reveal an unexpected passage to hell in her heart." The organ that Gaitskill imbues with a key to the underworld is not chosen lightly. Though the austere fictive world of "Don't Cry" is typically thick with the emotional scars of too little or too much sex, Gaitskill never loses sight of the ambition to claim her readers' hearts. Sometimes her intensity is a bit frightening: she tracks our empathy, our sadness and our erotic inner lives as though she were a black-ops sharpshooter. But the motivation for her hot pursuit is not cheap reader sadism. Instead, the author is ceaselessly sharpening our sensitivity to the pain of her characters before she pulls out the big transgressive guns. In one new story, a middle-aged woman with a promiscuous past talks with a fellow nurse about their mutual childlessness and hungrily latches onto the other woman's offhand declaration about the "other ways to be a loving person." It's a sentiment almost Oprah-like in its gentle ambition, yet it comes off like the furthest thing from an easy answer. Yes, you think, this is precisely the mode of deliverance the onetime libertine is after. With unpretentious yet heartbreaking lines like these, Gaitskill owns you, and earns the right to put you through the wringer of vulgarity.

Chuck Palahniuk, by contrast, earns none of these rights with his sucker-punch prose, but he wants desperately to be edgy anyway. Because he wrote "Fight Club" more than a decade ago, the author appears to have a standing invitation to publish a book per year, even if the ideas aren't there. In his latest novel, "Pygmy," about an adolescent terrorist posing as a foreign-exchange student, the title character's imperfect English is an excuse for the author to rail against the hegemony of syntax. But this guy ain't Faulkner, and his Pygmy can't hold a candle to Benjy Compson. In truth, the language-mangling terrorist is simply another excuse for Palahniuk to satirize Middle America, a quarry so well mined that it has precious few minerals left. "For official record, host father present as vast breathing cow, blowing out putrid stink diet," the Pygmy observes. Anyone can write this way. Allow me to submit the following: Lazy writer put up, for purchase of fan lovers, poisonous toxin belch of words. Worse than these sins of style, Palahniuk doesn't understand what makes America tick. When one character learns of the Pygmy's terror plans, she shrugs off the mass murder in order to pursue a personal gripe. This is, I suppose, a riff on how solipsism has made us insensitive to collective dangers, but the details are laughably false. Whatever else America might be, it is not insufficiently wigged out regarding the prospect of terrorism.

When Gaitskill tries her hand at sketching the political moment, she goes for more subtlety, and also gets the emotional facts right. In "The Little Boy," an elderly woman at an airport lounge agrees to watch the child of a young mother rushing off to a ticket counter. As the woman looks on, the boy tells her about his father fighting in Iraq. Later we learn the boy has been lying. "I don't have a husband. I don't have anybody in Iraq," the mother says. Six years into that war, this story's twist of the knife feels like the most transgressive kind of truth: how a conflict that needed lies to be born will become the hook of many lies still to come. Palahniuk's book will likely get more press than Gaitskill's when it comes out in May. Its scene of a brutal anal rape, which the author plays for maximum prurience, might even convince Palahniuk's devoted cadre of fans that the author can still put the fear of God into the mainstream. But if his admirers really want to cheer on a writer armed with scary talents, it's Gaitskill they should read.