The Globe and Mail

Short story fans like things short, so here's the skinny: Buy this book.

Now, for the rest of you, the fat: Don't Cry is book No. 5 for acclaimed New York author Mary Gaitskill, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire.

Gaitskill is a switch-hitter, lush and fierce in both short stories and novels. Bad Behaviour and Because They Wanted To are the story collections; Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica are the novels.

Sex and violence, beauty and ugliness, loneliness and connection are some of the polarities that recur in Gaitskill's work. Her polarities, though, have a way of collapsing: Take the echoes between the two main characters in Two Girls, Fat and Thin, or the eponymous Veronica, a gorgeous grotesque.

This can read like cliché – Sex and violence are opposite sides of the same coin? Do tell! – but with Gaitskill, cliché is invariably transcended. She finds words for intimacy at its most inarticulate, in stories that jolt, seduce and disturb.

In College Town, 1980, Dolores, a belle laide who's pulled out chunks of her own hair, mooches around Ann Arbor, Mich., taking anti-depressants, drinking coffee, doing her nails, running into histrionic friends, shoplifting eyeliner pencils and obsessing over a recent break-up. The reader might be tempted to sympathize with Dolores's roommate: “I'm tired of hearing these middle-class bitches who've never worked in their life, whose parents pay their rent and buy them college degrees, sit around and talk about how depressed they are.”

The characters are each thrashing and flailing, each flowing into the other, each floating alone

But Gaitskill knows how to pull open the trap door beneath the reader's feet, so that we drop from clever, supercilious dialogue and elegant description to something deeper. The story ends not with wistfulness or despair, but with unexpected power, stark and brutal.

This up-from-the-deep brutality is not easily contained in conventional short-story structures, and Gaitskill has the confidence to break those bonds. Folk Song, an extended riff on the uneasy conjunction of three disparate articles on the same newspaper page (torture and murder, a sexual marathon, turtles), reads more like an essay than a fiction.

Mirror Ball, perhaps the most challenging story in the collection, is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace in that it's tremendously annoying right up until you realize it's a little bit of genius. A young couple has a single sexual encounter that almost destroys them both. The young man steals a piece of the girl's soul, Ardor. Ardor takes up residence in his room with pieces of other girl's souls he's nabbed over the years: Gentleness, Forbearance, Instinct. The girl goes out of her mind trying to get her Ardor back.

The young man has his own problems; at the age of two, he hid the fragile part of his own soul inside “a tiny model of his childhood home, except the model had no windows and only one door, which was always locked.” The girl's Ardor cries out to the young man's Hunger; the reader's Patience heads for the door.

But, by some alchemy, Gaitskill transmutes this nonsense into a tiny, lucid moment as the girl and the young man meet unexpectedly on the street a year after their first and only encounter. We realize the author has charted an emotional journey of exquisite delicacy with what suddenly seems like the only map that makes any sense.

But the collection's masterpiece, for this reader, was The Arms and Legs of the Lake. The setting is a train to Syracuse, N.Y. The reader drifts in and out of assorted passengers' heads. Jim Smith is a psychologically damaged African-American Iraq-war veteran; Bill Groffman is his white equivalent, home six months sooner, on the surface better adjusted but seething beneath. Jennifer Marsh is a middle-aged peace activist, the “kind of white woman” who, in a car full of black people, would “glue herself, big-eyed and serious, to the one pitiful fool in the bunch.”

That's the assessment of Carter Brown, the conductor, who's looking for an elusive bathroom smoker so he can give himself the pleasure of throwing someone off his train. The smoker turns out to be Mr. Perkins, a Second World War vet who wants to respect a war he freely admits he can't understand:

“Stuff about raping young girls, killing their families, doing sex-type things with prisoners, taking pictures of it – and then you'd read somebody sneering that ‘the Greatest Generation' couldn't even fire their guns, while these new guys, they liked to kill.”

The story's title comes from Jim Smith's hazy grasp of geography; he thinks the Hudson River must be a lake. “The river leads to the lake; the river is the arms and legs of the lake. Only thing bigger than the lake is the ocean.”

The characters are each thrashing and flailing, each flowing into the other, each floating alone. Here's a last, unexpected polarity: brutality and compassion. Mary Gaitskill masters both. Buy this book.

Annabel Lyon's novel The Golden Mean is forthcoming.