Customer Reviews

Veronica

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

"Veronica" is a complex portrait of a typical suburban girl, restless and bored, disaffected, scornful of the ordinary world around her. Yet Allison has incredible beauty and dabbles in modeling. She casually agrees to have her photos entered in a contest, and she is instantly catapulted into a world of money, drugs and brutal sex. The assurances of proper supervision given to her parents were nonsense, and she becomes the lover of Europe's most powerful agent. It all falls apart, of course; she returns home, tries to finish school, but is inevitably drawn to her former life. She misses her abusive agent, the drugs, the money, the glamour, all the things that almost destroyed her. When we last see her she is older, sick and alone.

Having said that, the book is nothing like that at all. It takes place in a day, as the middle aged Allison drags herself to work as a cleaning person, visits friends and trudges up a mountain in the rain to tire herself out so she can sleep. As she moves through this ordinary, dreary day, her mind skips back to the past, her glamorous and painful life, but most of all to Veronica. Veronica is an improbable friend for the then-elegant Allison; she's boistrous, badly dressed, and embarrasses Allison in public. Yet Veronica emerges as the only person Allison cares about. In the end, she realizes that Veronica saved her by allowing the cold Allison to pity her, and thus become human. It's a redemption of sorts, as Allison faces her own illness and death.

This is a difficult book to read and to write about! Gaitskill gives us a detailed, painful look at the world of modeling--talk about pity! And at times she is a wonderful writer. Allison is sitting on a bus looking down at a car below:

"I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain."

But at times I found it slow going, a bit overwritten. And the lives Gaitskill focuses on are destructive, hard and cruel. Allison's world is far from a kind one, and the "gratitude and joy" she feels towards Veronica after Veronica's death is the only gleam of light we see. "Veronica" wons many awards and lots of praise, I imagine for its writing and cold-eyed view of a hard world. But be prepared.

What a strange book. I had never read Mary Gaitskill -- a friend bought this for me after we both read the article about her in the New York Times. I found her writing style compelling and unique, but sometimes irritating. Her character observances cut to the bone very swiftly, but there are occasions when she seems to spin out in a vortex of meaningless poetical whatever, and then I would have to just skip the paragraph altogether. I would often have to reread something over and over again to get its meaning; sometimes I would finally grasp what she was getting at (and feel illuminated and really impressed by the knife-point of her skill), and other times she just lost me. The story is very dark and rather hopeless until the final paragraph (I'm still not sure how Alison comes to this final moment of redemption; I think it might be another Gaitskill poetical spin-out). I'm not sure why I should care about anything that went on in the story, but she did pull me in. Gaitskill's craft is in the tightness and economy of her character observations, her vivid fractions and moments. And yet I wasn't able to really 'see' Paris or New York (the characters could have been anywhere) and I'm not even convinced that Gaitskill came to know the modelling world of which she wrote. (I'm not convinced she's familiar with the HIV world either, though I might be wrong about that). Highly ambivalent about this book, obviously.

I can think of no author since Virginia Woolf, and no book since Mrs. Dalloway, that achieves what Woolf called transparency as brilliantly as Mary Gaitskill has achieved it in her novel, Veronica. By transparency, Woolf meant a portrait of whole character; mind, feeling, past, present, motility; the process of thought and action by which we make our way in the world each day, the manner in which we absorb life around us and make emotions that teeter at the edge of sanity coherent; how we come to understand our fragile place in the world.
Mary Gaitskill's uncanny sense of how uneven life can be drives a narrative without rules, a story told according to the way we think, this impression or that triggering a memory, an impulse, or something more inchoate; a feeling not yet fully formed or half forgotten, an impression of the world made from a father's unfallen tears in a moment of frightening epiphany. Mary Gaitskill's novel is not about moral judgment, injury, guilt, forgiveness, or fate, it is about life: what it feel like to navigate the days, months, and years using what gifts we may have, surviving our follies, learning to face the truth about aging and mortality, and maybe gaining wisdom.
Alison may at first seem cold, somewhat passive and naïve, until we reflect that she is a teenage girl of uncommon attractiveness who has run away from home into a world of predators. She finds her way into a modeling career and copes with the advantages and pitfalls of sudden success, discovering a cycle of exploitation, rejection, and finally, failure. She leaves that flamboyant career and eventually finds a position as a word-processing temp for an advertising firm working the night shift. There she meets Veronica.
Veronica is like those people who come into our lives through the back door, so to speak, and never leave. They are those friends we have that we often don't think of as friends, exactly. They are those irregulars who, for some reason, take notice of us; we keep them at a certain distance, we hear their stories, we don't approve of them, yet something about their vulnerability gives us courage to accept our humanity, and over time we discover that in this oblique connection we have learned something about love.
This is a very incomplete description what Gaitskill has created. Her story is a kaleidoscope of sensations and reflections taken from the myriad faces one meets in a lifetime of large and slight import, and those experiences, good and bad, that we have had and that others have had, from which at last we begin to draw conclusions about the world and find meaning for our lives. Mary Gaitskill's Veronica is a work of fiction carried to the level of art, something very rare indeed.

I don't know if this book would be for everyone in it's sometimes gritty and seedy depiction of the 'glamorous life' of a former model reflecting on her life.However the writing is like reading poetry, with simple observations conveyed in an all sensory descriptiveness that's just stunning. The captivating first person narrative flashes from her childhood, to her present life, with the majority of the novel focusing on her relationship with a woman she briefly worked with, (Veronica), who gets AIDS from a bisexual lover. As I said before, the book certainly won't be for everyone, but it's truly an example of a writer who is brilliant at capturing moments with precision and breathtaking clarity.

Much like Mary Gaitskill's previous novel, "Two Girls, Fat and Thin", "Veronica" is a tale of two women who forge an unlikely friendship despite differences in physicality, age and outlook. Of course, Gaitskill's hallmark, twisted sexuality is in play, joined by other sunny topics, such as aging, drugs and disease.

Gaitskill is hard to like, her writing is spare and cold, her characters are often as embraceable as shards of glass. Yet, however off-putting her subjects and subject matter, Gaitskill's talents are undeniable The reader is allowed access to interior monologues of searing acuity.

This passage shows her insightful and unsparing prose perfectly:
"When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door."

Gaitskill captures the generation (be it the blank generation or the late baby boom) who thought the world was theirs, and now realize that like Veronica and Alison, we all die sooner or later.

I loved this novel. "Veronica" is freshly and honestly told with a perspective not often seen in serious fiction. The narrator is a woman named Alison. At the time we meet Alison, she is about fifty years old, alone, poor, broken and sick with hepatitis and other ailments. She lives in San Rafael, California and works as a cleaning woman for John, a photographer and former friend. Alison tells her story in the course of a day, as she cleans John's studio, takes a shabby bus towards home, and wanders up and down a hill in a forest reflecting upon her life.

Among the most striking features of "Veronica" is the varied sense of place, with five areas receiving particularized descriptions. The first is Hoboken, New Jersey, where Alison grew up in a family with angry, unhappy parents and two sisters. The second is San Franciso. At 16, Alison ran away and lived on the street selling flowers. The descriptions of the seedy North Beach areas of the city are among the most powerful in the book. A significant portion of the story is also set in Paris, as Alison becomes a famous fashion model and the mistress of a powerful and sinister agent. Gaitskill presents both the glamor and the underbelly of Parisian life, as seen through her young protagonist. The fourth major location described in the book is New York City. Alison meets her friend, Veronica, and has another temporary success working as a model. Gaitskill captures well the shimmer and pace of New York City life, in its cruelty and opportunity. The final setting of the book is San Rafael, California, where the aging and sick Alison makes her home and recounts her story. In the book, Gaitskill and her narrator shift repeatedly from one scene to another as Alison reflects upon her like. This gives the book a collage-like stream of consciousness quality which, while difficult to follow in places, enhances the force of the story.

In addition to its varied setting, "Veronica" tells a moving multi-faceted story. As a teenager, Alison ran away from home in New Jersey to San Francisco and works in the notorious North Beach area. With her naievety, she is taken advantage of by a man purporting to be a modeling agent. But for better or worse, this incident leads to Alison's opportunity to become a successful model in Paris. After experiences both glittering and sordid, she returns home and enrolls in junior college in New Jersey. The allure of the fast-paced glittery life proves irresitible to her. Alison moves to New York City and eventually again pursues fashion modeling.

Alison becomes friends with an eccentric woman named Veronica, sixteen years older than she is who has a bisexual male lover. The story is set near the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and Veronica's lover contracts AIDS and dies, and Veronica does as well. Alison and Veronica meet while Alison is temping and doing word-processing jobs in New York. The on-again off-again friendship deepens when Alison learns that Veronica has tested positive and she refuses to abandon her.

There is a great deal of rawness in this book and a sense, as Veronica says at one point, of living life on the edge. Alison is both repelled by the shallowness of her life and compelled to follow its allure. Her many ambivalences are at the heart of this novel. I was right to leave the beaten path of conventionality, Alison says to the reader in several places, to find my own path and to see the world in my own way. A major theme of the book lies in how close Gaitskill and Alison come in showing the reader the allure and the appeal of Alison's unconventional, bohemian life.

Alison struggles to learn, through her relationship with Veronica not only how to accept her own life but also how to come to terms with her parents and family and hear their stories and failed dreams as well as her own. Alison's parents had fought each other furiously during life. But Alison learns songs and music from her father -- popular songs from the 1940's and Verdi's Rigoletto play important roles in the story -- and poetry and allegorical stories from her mother. The book opens with a fairy tale Alison heard from her mother when young -- which Alison effectively acts out through the course of the story. Alison's ambition to become a poet seems to be forsaken as she pursues her modeling. Ironically, however, she realizes poetry in the brilliant quality of her narrative, dreams and reflections. Broken, despondent, and sick at the end of the book, there is a suggestion that Alison may find peace and hope.

This book is a raw, unsentimental and inspiring read. It manages to include many seemingly contradictory themes and attitudes. It is both surrealistic, as it moves in Alison's thought from her life in the present to the past, from place to place, and brutally precise and frank in its depiction of people and places. Superficiality is intertwined with depth in "Veronica" and in its characters. I was greatly moved by this book.

Robin Friedman

"Veronica" is my first exposure to Mary Gaitskill's prose, but it certainly won't be my last. Her perceptions and abstractions make this book an utter delight to read. Though the character of Allison finds employment as a model, do not be deceived into thinking that "Veronica" is a fluff piece ("The Devil Wore Prada", it isn't.) And it's not a novel so much as a character study(s). Gaitskill provides deft and enlightening portraits of her creations, and her sentences are breathtakingly descriptive without being verbose.

However, the book's strengths might be considered weaknesses to some; if you're looking for a once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after formula, you likely won't find "Veronica" to be suitable reading material. On the other hand, one may discover after exploring "Veronica" that one-dimensional novel/fairy tales don't quite cut it after all. It takes an especially gifted writer to broaden a reader's horizons thusly, but I dare say Ms. Gaitskill qualifies.

Masterful writing. This is not a happy, pretty book. It goes to dark, dreary places and deals with worlds a lot of people would rather not see. But the writing is inspired and true, and the way Gaitskill weaves present and past is truly masterful.

Love, sex, death, friendship, illness, and pain - it's all here; boldly expounded on in Mary Gaitskill's disturbing and exquisitely written Veronica. Writing as though she is single-handedly redefining the genre of literary fiction, Gaitskill has written a compelling and persuasive story of a seemingly incompatible friendship in the age of AIDS.

Alyson first meets Veronica when she's working as a temp for an ad agency in New York City. Initially a little too forward, brash, and a little too hard to handle, Alyson is hesitant to befriend the slightly heavyset older woman who has difficulty making friends and is, at least to Alyson's eyes, an unmitigated fashion disaster.

When Veronica confides that she has contracted HIV from Duncan - her self-confessed bisexual boyfriend - Alyson, with a mixture of pity, compassion, and perhaps even love, adopts this abrasive, prissy, uncompromising woman, who doesn't know when to keep quiet, "she has a lot of smart cracks stored up. She needed them, when she didn't have them, she was naked and everybody saw."

But Alyson's friendship of Veronica is only part of the story: Gaitskill steadily charts Alyson, from her journey as a fashion model in decadent Paris and Manhattan of the 1980's, to her a claustrophobic childhood in suburban New Jersey, complete with an uncommunicative, reserved father, a wayward, nervy mother, and two very ordinary sisters.

We are first introduced to Alyson when she's fifty, the decadent hedonistic life of a model - the coke, the sex, the parties, and the beautiful people - a thing of the past. Now she's living a sad life, full of pain, she's lost her looks and is on disability, plagued by chronic arm and neck pain, with only her best friend John to pity her, "a beautiful girl in a ruined face," forever broken with age and pain coming through the cracks.

It is only natural that Alyson should cling to something familiar, remembering her friendship with Veronica with a kind of whimsical regret; Veronica certainly wasn't the center of her life, but she was always there, and she was the loyal person to fall back on. The recollection of her not only helps Alyson cope with her pain, but also provides the story's central mirror image - whilst Alyson was carried way, "loving the rich things and the money and people kissing my *ss," Veronica's friendship ultimately provided the only solid bedrock of her life.

This novel is all about memory and the search for connection, perhaps even for love. Alyson aches for a meaningful relationship, for some kind of bond with someone. Her problem is that she's constantly looking at people in her life as objects without specific functions, circulating in a world where the physical beauty is all, she wants to know people and to love, but she's developed a "habit of distance," that has become so deep, she doesn't know how to be with another person. Even when Veronica is near death's door, silently suffering, Alyson is quick to pass brittle and frail judgments about her.

Most of the characters in Veronica are unlikable, but it is to Gaitskill's enormous talents as a writer that she can expose their very real human flaws, and indeed create certain sympathies for their plight. Alyson is an utterly fascinating character, she seems to be suspended forever on an imaginary brink, eyes dimmed and looking at nothing. In Veronica the author has created a complex women who gradually realizes that there is a senselessly "disordered world" that is "slowly being taken from her. "

Elegantly written, the characters in Veronica are constantly living on the verge, but they also fully embrace their fates, whether it is chronic pain, a life of bad luck, or even certain death from an incurable disease, or just plain sadness - "sadness brimmed; it bore up my hate like water bears ice and carried it away." Their complicated relationships are ripe with anguish, lonesomeness, and neglect, but there's also an undeniable vestige of hope and optimism in this profound work of contemporary literary fiction. Mike Leonard January 06

The 1980s were a time of glittery prosperity and optimism in America. We were a society tuned into "Dallas" and "Dynasty" and "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," although most of us were working hard to make ends meet. Looking back we can see the excess and the darkness just beneath the rich and shiny surface. It was then that the AIDS epidemic came into our collective consciousness, and into our hospitals and homes. Mary Gaitskill, author of BAD BEHAVIOR and other acclaimed fiction, explores the gritty places in '80s culture in her latest novel VERONICA and finds, beneath the glamour, loneliness and sickness as well as the hope of salvation.

The protagonist and narrator of VERONICA is Alison. As an aimless and disaffected teenager Alison runs away from home and heads to edgy San Francisco. She lives in a world of drugs and casual sex and is discovered by a seedy photographer and transformed into a fashion model. Soon she is in front of the camera in Paris. Her fast-paced life may seem enviable, but it is really empty and soul-numbing. Alison's success in Paris lasts only as long as her affair with an influential man, and when it is over she finds herself in New York working as a temp and half-heartedly trying to revive her modeling career.

It is in New York where she meets Veronica, a kooky, abrasive, middle-aged proofreader with eccentric taste and an abusive boyfriend. Despite, or perhaps because of, their obvious differences, Alison and Veronica become friends. Over the years the two emotionally damaged women find solace in each other's company even though they often seem at odds with each other. Veronica's struggle with AIDS further complicates their relationship, but Alison remains loyal to her. And, as Alison starts to realize, the two are not as different as they appear.

The story is told in the course of one day. Alison is now middle-aged herself and sick with hepatitis. Veronica has been dead for years, but her memory is like a ghost haunting Alison or perhaps like the refrain of a song stuck in her head. As Alison works, now as a maid for an old friend, her thoughts repeatedly turn to her past, to the lessons she has learned, to those she is still learning, and especially to Veronica. Alison questions who she is, if she is no longer beautiful, and how her experiences have shaped her. She thinks about how she wants to spend the rest of her life; what she learned from Veronica's life and death force her to rethink her other relationships, especially with her family.

VERONICA is a dark novel, yet not really pessimistic. Gaitskill's narrative voice is complex and unique, but not always easily readable. Alison is often hard to like, but she is always brutally honest with herself as she confronts the life she has made. VERONICA is ultimately about beauty and redemption; the short-lived and fragile exterior kind of beauty, and the rare and valuable interior kind. It is about a formerly physically beautiful woman's journey to self-worth and spiritual beauty. It is only once Alison moves beyond physical beauty as a category that she can find redemption, and Veronica is --- in her own flawed and human way --- the redeemer.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman