We’re living in lonely times. Under orders to isolate at home, we’re separated from our friends, family, coworkers, communities. We find ourselves missing our loved ones and missing, too, the many strangers with whom we used to share the city streets. Some people wonder if and when they’ll touch another person. Others go feral, knowing that there’s no point in primping when they’re not going to be seen. Most of the time, these conditions feel unprecedented, unlivable.
Mary Gaitskill did not write her fiction for this moment, but as the country’s leading artist of prepandemic isolation—and of the sudden, miraculous collapse into intimacy that it can spawn—she is perhaps, more than any of her contemporaries, the writer of our times. A skillful composer of short stories and several novels, Gaitskill…
