The Mare

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling' Guardian When Velveteen Vargas, an eleven-year-old Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn, comes to stay with a couple in upstate New York, what begins as a two-week visit blossoms into something much more significant. Soon Velvet finds herself torn between her hosts - Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic and Paul, a college professor - and her own tormented mother. Ginger longs for a child of her own, but Paul continues to refuse. Bemused by her gentle middle-aged hosts, but deeply intuitive in the way of clever children, Velvet quickly senses the longing behind Ginger's rapturous attention. Velvet's one constant becomes her newly discovered passion for horse riding, and her affection for an abused, unruly mare. A profound and stirring novel about how love and family are shaped by place, race and class, The Mare is a stunning exploration of the sometimes unexpected but profound connections made throughout our lives.

About the Author :
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry, the novels Veronica, The Mare and Two Girls Fat and Thin, the novella This is Pleasure and the memoir Lost Cat. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.

Review :
Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space. Penetrating ... confronts, head-on, white privilege and black victimhood. Gaitskill's novel is not a children's book, but it is a book about what children long for, and how we long for the same thing many years after we've left childhood behind Velvet is that most wonderful of fictional creations: a convincing child who manages to be a captivating and perceptive narrator. Visceral and haunting, and the telling, with its shifting first person narrative, is nothing short of masterful. A poignant, beautiful coming of age story about race, class and motherhood. A thoroughly compelling read ... redemptive and moving, The Mare offers as much fresh air for the author (and the reader) as it does for her characters. A timely examination of the pains and pleasures that follow one woman's attempt to bridge the yawning gap of understanding between two races. Emotionally complex voices crafted with skill and sensitivity. Her voice captures a child's mixture of insight and innocence ... As a model for getting back in contact with the natural world, this is a delirious dream. As an acknowledgment of what human beings fail to offer each other, it comes closer to being a nightmare. A novel about race, class and, as Gaitskill's convincingly drawn characters show how different worlds collide, the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the two in America. The Mare is a dark, dreamlike novel, at times nightmarish, at others offering glimpses of the sublime, shocking in its raw depiction of violence, and beautiful in its evocation of flawed love. a devastatingly good novel Here, without a drop of condescension, is fiction that pumps blood through the cold facts of inequality The range of Gaitskill's humanity is astonishing and matched only, it seems, by a desire to confront readers with the trembling reality of our shared ugliness