Hammer Time
Mary Gaitskill's nonfiction differs from her fiction not in quality—the essays in Somebody with a Little Hammer are as intense as the stories—but in delivery and voice. Like Chekhov, Mary Gaitskill uses simple, concrete language to bottle human desire. (She would not use that metaphor. In fact, there are few authors less likely to resort to metaphor than Gaitskill.) Here, though, the first person allows Gaitskill to turn the camera on herself in a way that fiction precludes. In her unboxing of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Gaitskill opens with a joke that both perforates her subject and undoes a
