Veronica

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.

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 jud

"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.

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.