Books like Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I love Mary Gaitskill. This is her first novel. This book is structurally flawed, but I think the flaw is due to her focus and the material and probably unavoidable. (Her second novel, Veronica, is a diamond.) The prose is flawless. Her observations are incisive, honest, vicious, hilarious, and penetrating. And oddly comforting. I have read this book at least four or five times and don't doubt that I'll read it again.I dock a star not so much for the aforementioned structural problems but because the story contains an extremely over-caricatured Ayn Rand. The novel would have been stronger had she rendered Rand with more subtlety. Rand's biography is bizarre, contradictory and fantastical, but here she is little more than a cartoon character. She is a cardboard stage prop for the more fully rendered characters to bat about. I think Gaitskill missed an opportunity to do something more complex with Rand in her fiction. But I imagine it could be argued that Justine's magazine article is a kind of meta-reference to Gaitskill's own treatment of Rand. Or that Gaitskill's rendition is reflective of the way Rand glossed over the edges of her rather 2D characters in her books. So who knows.