Faces and Masks

The following was written by my wife, Mary Gaitskill, and will appear in the French newspaper Liberation .

In his essay on Nikolai Gogol’s

“The Overcoat,” Vladimir Nabokov



describes the short story as “a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the dim pattern of life,” a beautiful, flexible and fantastically broad phrase. “The Overcoat” is about a poor half-crazy little clerk in pre-Revolutionary Russia who, when his thin coat rots off his back one freezing winter, spends his entire savings on having a new coat made for him.
The new coat is magnificent, and it transforms his life. For the first time he is invited to a party where he drinks too much; on the way home he is robbed of his coat; the robbery breaks his heart; he sickens and dies. The story is typically read as an allegory of “the little guy” in a socially unjust world, but Nabokov sees something more terrible, a story of “whirling masks,” through which the tortured human protagonist must wander in desperate confusion, and in which the true plot, as opposed to the literal one, comes from “that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”


How garish are these masks that talk to us non-stop everyday, how huge they loom out of television and cyberspace!


What secret depths do they come from, what primitive forces are finding expression through them? John McCain, having unleashed insane Pandora, is now trying to stuff her back in the box probably because human beings are horrified at seeing his rallies turn into pre-lynch mobs. But when one of his supporters denounces Obama as “an Arab,” and McCain responds like a person (“He’s a decent family man”), he’s booed by his own. While one of his masks makes nice, the others keep putting out the misinformation. Through it all wanders the human voter—who, if he’s Republican, bought the overcoat years ago and, though it’s been stolen from him, still worships it on his knees.