I finished The Mare by Mary Gaitskill on the subway yesterday and cried. Then I looked up and there was a woman getting off the L at the same time as me who was wearing jodphurs and she had a riding crop in her bag. I had the overwhelming urge to give her my galley. I thought about what I’d say. “You seem like you might like horses – this is a great book with horses in it.”  I did not, of course, do this.  But it still seemed slightly magical to encounter an equestrian on the subway at that moment. 

There is magic in The Mare though it’s unclear whether the heroine, Velveteen Vargas, can actually hear horses talking to her or whether this is her intuition or a projection of her hopeful mind and heart, and it doesn’t matter which, ultimately.  A lot of the book is about the distance between what we think or hope or imagine other people are thinking and feeling and their actual thoughts. No one is better than Mary Gaitskill at describing moments of being able to sense what someone else is feeling, either accurately or so close to accurately that the distance between your two consciousnesses recedes temporarily. 

Also, where was that girl going to ride horses near 14th Street and 8th Avenue?