The Devil’s Treasure

“What is in the bag behind the Devil’s chair? Knowledge of some kind? Surely something a little girl did not know should be left alone. I’ve been criticized—and sometimes admired—for what some readers see as my affinity with cruelty, both in my depictions of it and my supposed infliction of it on characters.”

Mary Gaitskill takes her own novels apart and puts them back together: a full-color collage of fiction, memoir, criticism, and her own artwork, threaded through with a fairy tale about a seven-year-old girl who goes down to Hell to steal the Devil’s treasure.

A seven-year-old girl named Ginger goes down to Hell and takes the sack of treasure from behind the Devil’s chair. She discovers she can never put it down — that the treasure has become part of her, that it is something she needs but does not want, and that what it tells her about love and pain is that the two will not be separated, in this life or the one beyond. Ginger’s story runs the length of The Devil’s Treasure, and everything else in the book grows out of it.

Around that fairy tale Mary Gaitskill sets long passages from four of her own novels — Two Girls, Fat and Thin; Veronica; The Mare; and one still in progress — and then answers them in her own voice, explaining where each book came from, what it cost her, and what she now thinks it was really about. It is a director’s cut of a body of work: an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience, the ideally, sometimes quixotically high and the grossly, confusedly low.

The book is made to be looked at as well as read. Printed in full color, the excerpted fiction runs in orange and Ginger’s story and the author’s commentary in red, so that the page flickers as the registers change; Gaitskill’s own collages, made for this book, recall the images hung on Hell’s walls.

With the stylistic daring and preternatural acuity that has made her one of America’s most original writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that blends the huge prehistoric creatures swimming at the bottom of our collective ocean with a family picnicking on the beach while a podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious child explores the lapping waves.