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
If you want to read something fast and exciting, don’t try to read this book. I’m conscious to say anything bad about the novel that might put-off a suspecting reader, because I love this book. Alison and Veronica meet in the year of the glamorous 80’s era in New York. Alison is a young model trying to escape the wreck of her blossoming career and Veronica – the eccentric, critic, fashionable middle-aged office worker- her friend. Over the next twenty-years their friendship blooms and encompasses tenderness, sacrifice, love and death. Narratives from the present to past and the other way that creates a timeless depth and comparison to an era we can only knew if that is where we belong.I love everything about the 80’s. Being born in the year of 1987, I guess I can feel for the era through its music. Unconsciously hearing something from that year over the radio as a kid that even though I don’t really recall hearing something (and having no specific memory about it), places and everyday actions –like taking a bath- sometimes makes it utterly recognizable, asking myself ‘when did I heard that song?’. Why did I tell you this one? The book makes me think. And reminisce.Well anyway, the novel is somehow nostalgic for my taste that I began to like it. Gaitskill’s prose here is like a multi-colored yarn. Connected in one piece but different and none the less have connections that I have to remind myself the point of view is from two different timelines. I also never find myself confuse because I was so attached with her narratives. The writing is edgy, there is violence but it’s not pretentious, describing things around with a keen observation for the macabre but in a poetic way. It doesn’t have the ‘what will happen next’ feel to it but you continue to read the story anyway. Basically it doesn’t have a plot to start with, but somehow the thought of questioning the novel’s drive is really not needed here. Gaiskill presents the reader nothing but leaves the reader questioning without hoping for an answer and feeling satisfied without having something. It is a feeling with a word I really cannot describe. I can call this novel ‘to each his own’ type since I would agree if someone hates it. But it has some pleasure I don’t know what to call. It resides within beauty and ugly. Maybe you reading it would have a name for it. It is also like an art, viewed in many different interpretations. Like what gift Allison got from Veronica.The novel is a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. A New York Times Review Best Book of the Year and a finalist for both Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.Opening Sentence: When I was young, my mother read me a story about a wicked little girl.Ending Sentence: I will be full of gratitude and joy.
What do You think about Veronica (2005)?
As far as the story itself, I thought it was lackluster and a bit pretentious. I appreciated what Gaitskill was trying to do, that she was trying to explore notions of superficiality and depth when it comes to personal interactions. I also liked that she gave her two main characters, these women who are by turns pitiful and infuriatingly self-destructive, a sense of dignity even though they were behaving in ways I found really sad and upsetting. But for the most part, I thought she was striving too much to be deep and thoughtful and literary. I don't really care for that in college-level creative writing classes, and I don't think I particularly care for it with National Book Award Winners. I mean, be deep and thoughtful and literary, but don't let me see you strain to attain those qualities. I don't want to see your effort. (BTW, this isn't the first Gaitskill I've read, but I don't recall the earlier stuff I've read of hers being quite so strained.)Where this book really shines, though, is in the writing. One of Gaitskill's conceits was to describe some sort of sensory experience using an adjective that appeals to a different sense, like the phrase "sequined music," for instance. It's a visual descriptor coupled with an auditory noun, yet it worked. I could just imagine the kind of glammed-out pop-rock her character was listening to. Perhaps it might have generated a different genre for you, but that's okay - the point is, it instantly brought something to mind, and it did so using unconventional word choices. As someone who has seriously taken up writing in the past few months - I'm talking several hours a day - my appreciation for a writer who can come up with ways to convey ideas and emotions without resorting to facile cliches is infinite. So I was really torn with this book. I enjoyed reading it, but again, primarily for the craftsmanship of the language. As far as the story itself, though, I felt it left a lot to be desired.
—Caitlin Constantine
Veronica, published in 2005, is an uneven, “undisciplined” (as one reviewer put it) novel with a first-person narrator, Alison, who is a former model in her late 40s now sick with Hepatitis C and scraping by on a meager office-cleaning job. The novel is unusual, with a stream-of-consciousness style that moves the narrative disorientingly back and forth in time as Alison looks back on her exciting, debauched, youth and her unlikely friendship with an older woman, Veronica, who died of AIDS. Although the writing is interesting, often skillful, and vivid in its depiction of a young person coming of age at a particular time (the 80s), it can also be repetitious and overwrought. In addition, the motives of the shallow protagonist are not explored, and I found it difficult to invest in her or any of the characters, apart from Veronica, who, although supposedly central to the main character, does not appear on many pages of the book. However, in its treatment of a woman’s life over several decades, Veronica provides some strong take-aways.Veronica is primarily a coming-of-age story and, at its best, a meditation on youth and aging. Gaitskill’s stream-of-consciousness style gives the story a raw, authentic feel, and works well, when she doesn’t overdo it, in this impressionistic portrait of the glitzy, druggy 80s, with all of its rampant self-obsession and promiscuity. Gaitskill is also skilled at portraying what it’s like to be young, craving life experience and trying to escape into another world.However, despite Gaitskill’s nuanced handling of family dynamics (in a way that is never blaming or whiny), we never find out what makes Alison the way she is. Her older self is clear-eyed about her sordid youth as an exploited, mistreated model (who somehow loved every miserable minute of it, even longing to return to the debauchery each time she fled to a more “normal” lifestyle for respite). But she doesn’t question her behavior, except, to a limited extent, with respect to Veronica, and that occurs only after Veronica is dead and Alison falls ill herself. This protagonist is, in essence, a shallow, vain person who makes choices that are difficult to understand. It is hard to root for her; it is even hard to spend 250+ pages with her. Thank goodness for her older, slightly more introspective self, because, although the device of “looking back” seems contrived—as if it were pasted on later as scaffolding for the book’s various pastiches—this device is what gives the book the limited structure and depth it possesses.
—Diane
I mean, I fight my middle age at every turn. But some days you're just cranky about things - younger writers, younger people. Younger subjects. Mary Gaitskill can bring out the crank in anyone. Or maybe just anyone my age. She is a terrific writer, and an adept wordsmith. And I sorta hated this book, and knew I should like it more. Our heroine, Alison, is a terminally jaded young woman - her mother left her father, she's been a model and lived in Europe and failed at everything and seen it all. Already she's a bit of a pill. Her modeling career, which was good but not brilliant, brought her into a number of sexual situations, which Gaitskill outlines with glacial sophistication, but not much heat. Eventually Alison falls out of favor, either because her look is over or because her married lover tires of her. Either way, she ends up back in New Jersey, in community college and living with her tiresome family.Upon moving to New York, she takes up temping while contemplating resuming her modeling career. While temping, she meets Veronica, a larger-than-life figure who is sadly familiar from literature - seize the day, love whom you will, laugh til it hurts. She's not quite as shallow as Maude from Harold & Maude, but almost as annoying. She Veronica loved a gay man who gave her HIV, which will eventually kill her. (This isn't really a spoiler; Alison tells us this early on, as the book travels freely back and forth in time.)Oh, I don't know; I just found the whole thing annoying. It was also a finalist for the National Book Prize, clearly I am a grumpy growing-older-man with no patience for this stylish claptrap. Maybe it was a bad idea to read this during Thanksgiving weekend. Harrumph.
—Jack
