Among the dozens of stories Mary Gaitskill has published since her 1988 debut Bad Behavior, only one — “Secretary,” a detached BDSM narrative from that collection — has been loosely adapted for the screen. On its face, this fact is not entirely surprising. Gaitskill is, above all else, a prose stylist, renowned more for short fiction than her whipsawing novels, her characters prone to white-collar monotony and lurid sexual encounters. But if these themes have scared off Hollywood producers, they haven’t posed such obstacles for her closest peers, excavators of middle-American intercourse like John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates. In Gaitskill’s case, the sex isn’t the problem so much as its temperature, the hopelessness that precedes and follows.
Read Full Article »
