This Is Pleasure . . . and This Is Pain

From a visionary explorer of the mutable, sometimes treacherous edge of gender relations comes an electrifying update to her #metoo story This Is Pleasure, in which the voices of the women accusers expand and proliferate, as do the consequences for the man they accuse; this special “flipbook” edition includes the two narratives back to back.

The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a British book editor who was a fixture on the New York arts scene, lost his job after being accused of repeated transgressions toward women in his orbit. To Quin’s old friend Margot, his fall from grace is a nuanced tragicomedy, one that, in Gaitskill’s telling, reveals all the players involved as hurtful and hurting, sympathetic and maddening.

Now Quin, with his marriage on the rocks and no prospects, launches himself on an uncertain trajectory that takes him back to London where he grew up and finally to the American West, where he hopes to widen his horizons. And widen them he does, but not as he expected.

Gaitskill’s belief in our ability to see the shades of gray in people, even when we don’t admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.