The Nice Restaurant by Mary Gaitskill, 1995
The magic trick:
Changing the reader’s perception of two characters even while they stay in the same physical space throughout the story
Peak Era Gaitskill here for you today as we start five days of love stories this week.
Evan and Laurel are having dinner in a nice restaurant. They are playful with each other. They seem to like each other well enough.
The story, though, wants us to know more about these two. The plot holds still, in no rush to leave the nice restaurant. In fact, the entire story consists of a single scene and a single conversation (the couple’s dinner discussion).
It’s a limitation structurally, but, if anything, it only expands our understanding of this couple. Their playful flirtations in the beginning aren’t necessarily misleading. They just turn out to be couched in a whole ton more psychological complications than we knew in those sweet and innocent days of page one.
And that’s quite a trick on Gaitskill’s part.
The selection:
It had been impressed on her how kind it was of him to bother with a little girl like herself. Anyway, she liked him; he was always so carefully polite to her, treating her as though she were a grownup girl. A calm unruffled man, he grew annoyed only if people called him “Captain” too often. Sometimes he lost his temper and would say loudly things like: “What d’you think I’m captain of now – a penny-a-liner?” What was a penny-a-liner? She never found out.
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