A mare will push troublemakers to the edge of the circle, because that’s where the predators are. So Velveteen, an impoverished and lonely young girl whose mother is an immigrant to the US from the
Dominican Republic, is warned when she begins riding horses. But Velveteen, or Velvet, has been surrounded by predators since she was born. Labelled a troublemaker by her school-teachers for getting into fights; by her school-friends for being too pretty and
attracting their boyfriends; by her own mother, who slaps and kicks and beats her with disturbing regularity, Velvet is a classic ‘lost cause’, pushed to the edge of her circle where predators, mainly men, lie in wait for her.
But Mary Gaitskill’s novel is also a story about rescue and redemption, albeit in a realist vein where such things occur only occasionally and rarely without a penalty of some kind. Silvia, Velvet’s
mother, is a single parent with an eleven-year old daughter and a six-year-old son, called Dante. Summer-time means the kids are at home, but she is at work all day, and so she agrees to them going away through the ‘Fresh Air Fund’, a project designed to house
children from inner cities in the countryside for a few weeks.
Velvet is sent to stay with Ginger and her husband, Paul. Ginger is a recovering addict, as is Paul, but their marriage is a happy one and they want to have children of their own. The death of Ginger’s
sister puts paid to that as Ginger struggles with personal tragedy, but she does decide she would like to adopt. Fostering as part of the Fresh Air Fund is a first step on that path, and Ginger falls in love with pretty, vulnerable Velvet the moment she sets
eyes on her.
Almost immediately, she takes Velvet to the stables next door to see the horses and that’s when Velvet’s own love affair begins, with an abused and damaged mare called Fugly Girl that nobody else can
handle because she’s too aggressive. Velvet and Fugly Girl understand one another and thus a way out of the danger that everyday life confronts her with back home presents itself at last.
Of course, though, things are never so simple. The reality is that Velvet must deal with her mother’s jealousy of Ginger’s middle-class way of life and what it can offer her daughter; Velvet must deal
with peer pressure to sleep with boys before she’s ready; and Ginger must deal with an all-consuming love of Velvet that begins to destroy her marriage. The path to rescue and redemption is not an easy one, and human beings, messy and as flawed as they are,
tend to make it even harder.
Gaitskill’s telling of her clash-of-cultures novel is both expansive and intimate, and daring in her confrontation of racist attitudes and how women view other women, too. Ginger feels inadequate for
never having been a mother; her husband’s ex-wife Becca, uses her status as a mother to score points against the younger, prettier woman who stole her husband. The owner of the stables, Estella, tells Velvet’s mother in fluent Spanish that her daughter has
been riding horses, which Silvia expressly forbade. But Estella’s ability to speak to Silvia in her native language seems to enrage Silvia just as much as the meaning of her words. Gaitskill shows an intricate web of racial, gender and class tensions, that
constantly erupt in Silvia’s explosive behaviour. We fear for Velvet’s safety on almost every page.
That we do feel such fear isn’t the consequence of sensation or exaggeration. It’s thanks entirely to Gaitskill’s unerring ability to give her characters utterly believable voices,
as well as complex inner lives. Silvia and Ginger aren’t so far apart in their experiences of getting things wrong; these joint ‘mothers’ of Velvet battle daily with themselves and their own failings. That Velvet should choose to love the most difficult horse
in the stables is testament to her complex inner life, too, and Gaitskill writes about the relationship between a girl and a horse with a winning intensity. Enid Bagnold’s
National Velvet is updated from a middle-class English girl to a struggling second-generation New York immigrant. The transformation is an urgent and spellbinding one.
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