Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

I felt locked out of my own fat body, as if I were a disembodied set of impulses and electrical discharges, disconnected rage and fear, something like what real humans feel in abandoned houses and call "ghosts." I remembered my father on top of me, mashing my lungs, making my breath smaller and tighter until it barely existed, opening my body with his fingers, infecting me with his smells, his sounds, grinding his skin on mine until it came off as a powder and and filtered into m pores, spewing his deepest poison onto my skin where it was subtly absorbed into my blood and cells and came out in my sweat, my urine and shit, even my voice and words. I felt so saturated by his liquid stench, I didn't even think to wash it off when he left.

Dorothy Never is a fat woman in her middle age. Justine Shade is young and thin, and beginning a career in independent journalism. Both of them are victims of sexual abuse--Dorothy in particular, at the hands of her father, for many years--and the kind of sexual bullying that, while it might not rise to the level of rape, women are subjected to from the earliest moments of their childhood. They are radically different women, both physically and temperamentally, but they are drawn together when Justine decides to write an article about Anna Granite, a semi-Randian novelist and philosopher in whose inner circle Dorothy once moved. 

One of the most interesting things about Two Girls, Fat and Thin is the way that it writes about Granite's philosophy,  Definitism, without ever really defining or outlining it. Gaitskill gives the impression of a total philosophy without really having to write one: it's a belief that centers the individual, and the sanctity of their will; power and self-gratification are lionized; squishy modernist ideas about subjectivity are loathed. Though Dorothy denies it to Justine, it is certainly a right-wing philosophy, but one which clearly appeals to the abused and the victimized. "Every loneliness," Granite writes in one of her books, in a line that appeals deeply to the tortured Dorothy, "is a pinnacle." For Dorothy, Definitism gives her the confidence to cut her abusive father out of her life, and to forge a life of her own.

Justine takes what might seem to be an opposite tack: sexual masochism. As she works on the Anna Granite story, she meets a serpentine young bruiser at a bar who invites her deeper and deeper into fantasies of domination: being tied up, whipped, urinated on. In a way, the two women represent different responses to being victimized: a flight toward power and a flight toward submission. But these are more malleable categories than they might seem. As Justine notes, the strong heroines of Granite's books often find themselves yearning to be controlled and dominated. And it is Justine who, in her childhood, reacted to the unwelcome prodding of young boys by abusing a young girl herself.

I don't know if Two Girls, Fat and Thin totally worked. It sets up a relationship, even a collision, between the two women, that it can't really deliver on, choosing instead to keep the pair siloed in long life histories until the very end. The Granite stuff is dealt with obliquely, in a way that feels skilled but sort of hollow. Shadows of Veronica are here--there's something in the way that Dorothy, like Veronica, works in NYC at night, like a ghost of a person--but the book is fuller, more florid, more satirical, without any of Veronica's chilly cool. But I did find a lot to admire in how boldly and plainly it deals with abuse.