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Veronica
A finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, here is an evocative novel about female friendship in the glittering 1980s.
Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
257 pages, Paperback
First published October 11, 2005
702 people are currently reading
17260 people want to read
About the author
Mary Gaitskill
70 books1,491 followersMary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). She married writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. As of 2005, she lived in New York City; Gaitskill has previously lived in Toronto, San Francisco, and Marin County, CA, as well as attending the University of Michigan where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award. Gaitskill has recounted (in her essay "Revelation") becoming a born-again Christian at age 21 but lapsing after six months.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,071 reviews
January 14, 2021
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I've read
Bad Behavior,
a collection of nine short stories by the author that threw me across the room. Some of her disassociated New Yorkers looking for connections in all sorts of places occupy rent controlled apartments in my head and have refused to leave. I had high hopes for this novel, published in 2005 and dealing with a female friendship in 1980s Manhattan, but threw in the towel at the 73% mark. The prose is jeweled and characters pop off the page but there's so much Hooptedoodle. Fatal Hooptedoodle.
Alison scrapes by in San Mateo, accepting charity from a friend to clean his office, living with hepatitis and suffering chronic pain in her arm from a car accident. Alison remembers many things from the days when she was healthy and beautiful. She remembers growing up in suburban New Jersey and needing to escape. She remembers running away to San Francisco and living on sofas. She remembers fucking a catalog agent who launches her modeling career. She remembers working as a runway model in Paris and living the high life as the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe. She remembers working as an office temp in Manhattan and meeting Veronica, who is twelve years older, brash and kooky and soon to die of AIDS.
Gaitskill is a gifted writer and fills the novel with stellar Writing.
When it was over, I went down the stairs like I was sliding down a chute and came out the other end of the rabbit hole. On the street, it was business as usual. There was no secret language of little complicated things. The fog had come in and the store windows had gone dull. It was cold and I was hungry. I found a diner, where I had a piece of blueberry pie with two creamers poured over it, then tea with sugar. Across from me, a meager girl with raw bare legs was crying against a big older woman in a rough coat. Flares kept going off in my body, rushes of strange, blank sensation, like bursts of electricity. Gregory Carlson had given me cab fare, but I kept it and took the bus. It soothed me to sit with so many people and to rock with the movement of the bus creaking up hill after hill. The flaring subsided and my body quieted; with listless wonder, I realized that the song had not really said "ossifier." It had said "hearts of fire," which I thought was not as good.
Have you ever spent the day at a museum and got to a point where your brain needed a rest as much as your feet? When you can't see one more fascinating exhibit or one more priceless work of art? When it becomes stimulus overload? That's what reading Veronica felt like. Writing overload. Around the 30% mark, I started to get worn out. There's no story. Gaitskill's narrative is one long thread of "and then, and then, and then." Her prized writing is what John Steinbeck called Hooptedoodle, overly wordy prose that gets in the way of the story and he wishes he didn't have to read. I didn't either and that's why I gave up on the book.
Gaitskill's characters left a mark on me. I could visualize Alison dragging herself along the side of the road, suffering from pain, asking to bum a cigarette and maybe if I had one to give her, she'd say, "I used to be healthy and beautiful once." I recognized in the narrator the type of person who's neither good or bad, who neither makes good decisions or bad decisions, who's blessed with both good luck and cursed with bad, but tends to wear people down and move on, struggling to live one day to the next. And any one or two paragraphs of the book are excellent.
More highlights:
My roommate came home and turned on the light, and--bang!--there was no mother and no demons. She clacked across the floor in her high heels, chatting and wiping her lipstick off. It was 4:00 in the morning, but when she saw how unhappy I was, she took out her tarot cards and told my fortune until it came out the way I wanted it. (Luxury. A feast. A kind, loyal woman. Transformation. Home of the true heart.) The sun rose; the enamel rooftops turned hot violet. I had just lain down on the couch to sleep when Alain called and told me I was going to be moving into an apartment on rue du Temple. The rent would be taken care of. Everything would be taken care of.
We met for champagne and omelettes in a sunny bistro with bright-colored cars honking outside. He talked about the Rolling Stones and his six-year-old daughter, after whom he had named the agency Céleste. He asked if I wanted children. I said, "No." He grabbed my nose between two knuckles and squeezed it. The omelettes came heaped on white plates with blanched asparagus. He hadn't kissed me yet. He spread his slim legs and tucked a cloth napkin into his shirt with an air of appetite. I wanted badly to touch him. Inside its daintiness, the asparagus was acrid and deep. He said, "The first thing we need to do is get you a Swiss bank account. All the smart girls have one. First, you don't have to pay taxes that way. Then they invest it for you. Your money will double, triple. You should see!" I loved him and he obviously loved me. Love like in the James Bond movies, where the beautiful sexy girl loves James but tries to kill him anyway. We would love each other for a while and then part. Years later, I would ride down the street in a fancy car. I'd see Alain and he'd see me. I'd smile on my way past. Sexy spy music rubbed my ear like a tongue; it rubbed my crotch, too. We finished quickly and went to my new apartment.
Another way to describe this novel is that it is like a runway show or a dog show. Or a drag race (with cars, not transvestites). Some people can spend hours looking at fashion models or dogs or cars (or drag queens) going in circles. If you love Writing, this novel may be for you. I could see myself reading an essay about Gaitskill's themes and prose and loving that essay, but like Hooptedoodle, I just don't want to have to read it.
Mary Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1954. She's taught creative writing at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown University and Syracuse University. As of 2020, Gaitskill is a visiting professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.
In the event you missed it: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
Come Closer by Sara Gran
Alison scrapes by in San Mateo, accepting charity from a friend to clean his office, living with hepatitis and suffering chronic pain in her arm from a car accident. Alison remembers many things from the days when she was healthy and beautiful. She remembers growing up in suburban New Jersey and needing to escape. She remembers running away to San Francisco and living on sofas. She remembers fucking a catalog agent who launches her modeling career. She remembers working as a runway model in Paris and living the high life as the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe. She remembers working as an office temp in Manhattan and meeting Veronica, who is twelve years older, brash and kooky and soon to die of AIDS.
Gaitskill is a gifted writer and fills the novel with stellar Writing.
When it was over, I went down the stairs like I was sliding down a chute and came out the other end of the rabbit hole. On the street, it was business as usual. There was no secret language of little complicated things. The fog had come in and the store windows had gone dull. It was cold and I was hungry. I found a diner, where I had a piece of blueberry pie with two creamers poured over it, then tea with sugar. Across from me, a meager girl with raw bare legs was crying against a big older woman in a rough coat. Flares kept going off in my body, rushes of strange, blank sensation, like bursts of electricity. Gregory Carlson had given me cab fare, but I kept it and took the bus. It soothed me to sit with so many people and to rock with the movement of the bus creaking up hill after hill. The flaring subsided and my body quieted; with listless wonder, I realized that the song had not really said "ossifier." It had said "hearts of fire," which I thought was not as good.
Have you ever spent the day at a museum and got to a point where your brain needed a rest as much as your feet? When you can't see one more fascinating exhibit or one more priceless work of art? When it becomes stimulus overload? That's what reading Veronica felt like. Writing overload. Around the 30% mark, I started to get worn out. There's no story. Gaitskill's narrative is one long thread of "and then, and then, and then." Her prized writing is what John Steinbeck called Hooptedoodle, overly wordy prose that gets in the way of the story and he wishes he didn't have to read. I didn't either and that's why I gave up on the book.
Gaitskill's characters left a mark on me. I could visualize Alison dragging herself along the side of the road, suffering from pain, asking to bum a cigarette and maybe if I had one to give her, she'd say, "I used to be healthy and beautiful once." I recognized in the narrator the type of person who's neither good or bad, who neither makes good decisions or bad decisions, who's blessed with both good luck and cursed with bad, but tends to wear people down and move on, struggling to live one day to the next. And any one or two paragraphs of the book are excellent.
More highlights:
My roommate came home and turned on the light, and--bang!--there was no mother and no demons. She clacked across the floor in her high heels, chatting and wiping her lipstick off. It was 4:00 in the morning, but when she saw how unhappy I was, she took out her tarot cards and told my fortune until it came out the way I wanted it. (Luxury. A feast. A kind, loyal woman. Transformation. Home of the true heart.) The sun rose; the enamel rooftops turned hot violet. I had just lain down on the couch to sleep when Alain called and told me I was going to be moving into an apartment on rue du Temple. The rent would be taken care of. Everything would be taken care of.
We met for champagne and omelettes in a sunny bistro with bright-colored cars honking outside. He talked about the Rolling Stones and his six-year-old daughter, after whom he had named the agency Céleste. He asked if I wanted children. I said, "No." He grabbed my nose between two knuckles and squeezed it. The omelettes came heaped on white plates with blanched asparagus. He hadn't kissed me yet. He spread his slim legs and tucked a cloth napkin into his shirt with an air of appetite. I wanted badly to touch him. Inside its daintiness, the asparagus was acrid and deep. He said, "The first thing we need to do is get you a Swiss bank account. All the smart girls have one. First, you don't have to pay taxes that way. Then they invest it for you. Your money will double, triple. You should see!" I loved him and he obviously loved me. Love like in the James Bond movies, where the beautiful sexy girl loves James but tries to kill him anyway. We would love each other for a while and then part. Years later, I would ride down the street in a fancy car. I'd see Alain and he'd see me. I'd smile on my way past. Sexy spy music rubbed my ear like a tongue; it rubbed my crotch, too. We finished quickly and went to my new apartment.
Another way to describe this novel is that it is like a runway show or a dog show. Or a drag race (with cars, not transvestites). Some people can spend hours looking at fashion models or dogs or cars (or drag queens) going in circles. If you love Writing, this novel may be for you. I could see myself reading an essay about Gaitskill's themes and prose and loving that essay, but like Hooptedoodle, I just don't want to have to read it.
Mary Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1954. She's taught creative writing at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown University and Syracuse University. As of 2020, Gaitskill is a visiting professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.
In the event you missed it: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
Come Closer by Sara Gran
July 22, 2022
"What stood out, most loudly and violently were images of beauty so intense they were almost warped; some of these images were human. The fashion model seemed suddenly at the centre of the cultural world, inextricably wound in with art, music and cinema. These human images snagged my imagination, which twisted and turned reactively, picking and chewing over them, foolishly trying to get nourishment from them - for I wanted to be part of this vibrant and powerful world."
Mary Gaitskill's 'Veronica' is the intense and stylistic study of a friendship. Of love, pain, illness, and rejection set mostly in 1980's New York, it's a richly metaphorical tale, set against the nocturnal glamorous tyranny of the fashion modelling industry, and unfortunately for some, during an eruption of AIDS cases. There are moments when the world is at your feet, a dream come true. But also times when it's nothing more than a sleazy, degrading nightmare. One thing is certain, it pays well, even if it means having to spend days in the company of complete arrogant sexist assholes. For Allison and Veronica, both would experience the highs and lows of this hectic ruthless, and narcissistic lifestyle, both would find ways to grow stronger, but also succumb to weaknesses beyond their control.
The novel could be looked at as a kind of exercise in tainted nostalgia. The narrator, Allison is in her 40's, cleaning offices for a living, as we go back through her thoughts to a time when she made it as a model. It all started in Paris, strutting her stuff on the catwalk and becoming the mistress of one of the city’s most successful modelling agents, she is still pretty young, and not exactly wise in all her decisions, losing a lot of money, falling in and out with acquaintances (some were never even worth knowing), before ending up back in the States, after her illicit relationship crashed and burned in the city of love. After a stint back with her parents and sisters, she heads off to The Big Apple looking for work. And it's here she meets Veronica whilst proofreading as a temp, a brash, head-strong former model, twenty years her senior, who shows unpredictable oddball behaviour, and dates a bisexual (Duncan) who she adores. Both seem mismatched, and Allison finds her at times deplorable, being appalled and fixated by Veronica in equal measures. So to call the novel an out and out buddy story is misleading. You never get the impression they are true friends, but each still leaves an impression on the other. In a strange way they seem the right fit, but you also feel a coldheartedness between them, like they wouldn't be bothered if they were never to meet again. After Veronica is diagnosed with HIV, she losing all those closest to her, Allison is drawn to her more than ever, but with a strong sense of pity, as she rapidly loses her health.
On the whole the novel carries a sombre feeling throughout, portraying a brittle, echoing emptiness for it's two leading ladies, even though it's set in a booming New York, bursting at the seems with life and partying. The two main characters I eventually came to like, with all their issues and hiccups along the way, they were just two people trying to make their way in life, Gaitskill speaks an emotion that is easy to relate to. I was partially impressed with her richly drawn world, bringing to life the downtown art scene of the decade, for its beauty and glamour but also its fair share of grime and filth. She sees the whole picture with a larger canvas of almost viscerally aching melancholy, with depictions of some the most unsavoury elements of human interaction, big themes being nihilism, pity and rejection. The plot is somewhat beside the point (there isn't really one anyway) as its structure relies on a frenetic assemblage of vignettes flashing between the 80's and the present, and my biggest praise for Gaitskill, is it's humane and unsentimental approach, mixing a cocktail of brutal loneliness with moments of raw tenderness, and she gets down and dirty when the story needs to be, Mary is not afraid to articulate the anguished thoughts and feelings from which we prefer to turn away.
But that's just life, and the pains and joys, beauty and ugliness that go with it. I found it an engaging and penetrating work, as soulful as it was sordid, with characters who were realistic carrying flaws and problems like the rest of us. There were a few moments that I found too uncomfortable and below the belt, and it might have helped being a tad longer to give more of a backstory to Veronica, who still felt like a bit of an enigma to me, but some of Gaitskill's sentences were just like, wow. Sincere, and oh so true.
April 12, 2008
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill came very highly recommended. It was on a lot of "best of" lists and I'd actually had it on my list of "To Read" for a while. This was a book that I couldn't finish and that is a real dilemma for me. When I'm not enjoying a book at all, I never know whether to quit or keep going. If I don't like it early on, I feel like I owe it to at least give it a chance, and keep reading. Eventually I'm half-way through and even if I still don't like it, I'm like, "Well, I'm half-way through now...." But this one I finally just put down.
It's the story of a women who had been a model in Europe, fell from grace, contracted Hepatitis, and met an older, slightly crazier woman named Veronica in NYC, who died from AIDS. The story wasn't really about Veronica, though, it was about the infected former-model. I think eventually, further toward the end, we would have learned more about how Veronica influenced the other girl's life, or something. Reviews praise the writing as "poetic" but I thought it was flowery and weird and hard to follow. I found myself skipping over whole paragraphs, which is why I eventually decided, "What's the point?"
It's the story of a women who had been a model in Europe, fell from grace, contracted Hepatitis, and met an older, slightly crazier woman named Veronica in NYC, who died from AIDS. The story wasn't really about Veronica, though, it was about the infected former-model. I think eventually, further toward the end, we would have learned more about how Veronica influenced the other girl's life, or something. Reviews praise the writing as "poetic" but I thought it was flowery and weird and hard to follow. I found myself skipping over whole paragraphs, which is why I eventually decided, "What's the point?"
August 17, 2022
I never read a better description about what music meant in a period than Veronica. Found myself writing whole passages in my notebook. Deserved the National book award.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Second Reading: I often read bits of this book for inspiration in my own writing, and recently I decided I needed to read it again in toto. For a long stretch I was avid for the language, the literary firepower of Gaitskill's grim story about an ex-model, currently broke and ill with hepatitis, cleaning offices in the SF Bay Area for money and thinking about her life, her family, modeling in Paris and her unlikely friendship with a woman working the night shift as a word processor in New York, Veronica, a woman a generation older but having been similarly involved with questionable, fashionable people and damaged by them, contracting AIDS from her bisexual boyfriend in the 1980s.
I love the grit of this book, and the density of its sinuous prose. When I teach a class in the art of the sentence, I use this book.
"The more withered the reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream. From the dark hole of a bar on a street of sickness and whores comes a teeming cloud of music sparkling with warmth and glamour: Sweet dreams of rhythm and magic--Look in and see the dark dead blurs slumped on stools."
My favorite thing about the book are Gaitskill's insights on music and style. Here's a taste:
"There is always a style suit or suits. When I was young, I used to think the suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically--people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras--I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different.... But then five years later it changed again. Again, the TV announced, "Now we're this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!" Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trait at a time, you had to grab onto one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, "we" are loving, then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed. Although we were at war with terror, fashion magazines say we are sunny now. We wear bright colors and choose moral clarity. When I waiting to get a blood test last week, I read in a newsmagazine that terror must not change our sunny dispositions."
Her insights are so good, her language is so brilliant, and yet, I'm finding myself stalling about 3/4 the way through this very short book--only 225 pages long. Even though it's absolutely brilliant, I feel I've gotten what I wanted from it. I sometimes feel this way about certain remarkable, lyric novels that are just like desserts that are too sweet, too much-- a spoonful is good but a whole piece becomes repulsive. I don't like flourless chocolate cake either. The language is superb, and the insights about life are bigger and come faster than almost any other writer I can imagine. But at around page 165, I'm sick of the narrator and the similarity of dreary, decadent mood and event. I'm restless for a denouement. We'll see if I can finish.
>>>>>>>>>
Was able to get over my page 165 hump and complete the book. So much worthwhile in those last 50 pages. After we got finished with her love relationship with some guy I never cared about, she returned to Veronica for the rest of the book. Aside from some clumsy plot tying ups (what exactly had Allison been doing after trying to resuscitate her modeling career?) which didn't matter much, Gaitskill really dug down to find the reason we'd been reading--what was it Alison found in her friendship with the unlikely Veronica that made it stick to her through all this time. This is not at all sentimental, as what Gaitskill excels at is teasing out the subtle and unspoken emotions, not all of them (or even most of them) very generous, but they strike you as very true to life, the contrary feelings we hold when we are trying to help someone, or fail to help. The ending was lightly, carefully done, which I appreciated.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Second Reading: I often read bits of this book for inspiration in my own writing, and recently I decided I needed to read it again in toto. For a long stretch I was avid for the language, the literary firepower of Gaitskill's grim story about an ex-model, currently broke and ill with hepatitis, cleaning offices in the SF Bay Area for money and thinking about her life, her family, modeling in Paris and her unlikely friendship with a woman working the night shift as a word processor in New York, Veronica, a woman a generation older but having been similarly involved with questionable, fashionable people and damaged by them, contracting AIDS from her bisexual boyfriend in the 1980s.
I love the grit of this book, and the density of its sinuous prose. When I teach a class in the art of the sentence, I use this book.
"The more withered the reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream. From the dark hole of a bar on a street of sickness and whores comes a teeming cloud of music sparkling with warmth and glamour: Sweet dreams of rhythm and magic--Look in and see the dark dead blurs slumped on stools."
My favorite thing about the book are Gaitskill's insights on music and style. Here's a taste:
"There is always a style suit or suits. When I was young, I used to think the suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically--people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras--I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different.... But then five years later it changed again. Again, the TV announced, "Now we're this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!" Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trait at a time, you had to grab onto one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, "we" are loving, then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed. Although we were at war with terror, fashion magazines say we are sunny now. We wear bright colors and choose moral clarity. When I waiting to get a blood test last week, I read in a newsmagazine that terror must not change our sunny dispositions."
Her insights are so good, her language is so brilliant, and yet, I'm finding myself stalling about 3/4 the way through this very short book--only 225 pages long. Even though it's absolutely brilliant, I feel I've gotten what I wanted from it. I sometimes feel this way about certain remarkable, lyric novels that are just like desserts that are too sweet, too much-- a spoonful is good but a whole piece becomes repulsive. I don't like flourless chocolate cake either. The language is superb, and the insights about life are bigger and come faster than almost any other writer I can imagine. But at around page 165, I'm sick of the narrator and the similarity of dreary, decadent mood and event. I'm restless for a denouement. We'll see if I can finish.
>>>>>>>>>
Was able to get over my page 165 hump and complete the book. So much worthwhile in those last 50 pages. After we got finished with her love relationship with some guy I never cared about, she returned to Veronica for the rest of the book. Aside from some clumsy plot tying ups (what exactly had Allison been doing after trying to resuscitate her modeling career?) which didn't matter much, Gaitskill really dug down to find the reason we'd been reading--what was it Alison found in her friendship with the unlikely Veronica that made it stick to her through all this time. This is not at all sentimental, as what Gaitskill excels at is teasing out the subtle and unspoken emotions, not all of them (or even most of them) very generous, but they strike you as very true to life, the contrary feelings we hold when we are trying to help someone, or fail to help. The ending was lightly, carefully done, which I appreciated.
December 23, 2022
Loneliness and sadness pervade the pages of this novel about beauty and cruelty, as exemplified by the friendship between Allison, a model, and Veronica, an older, less attractive women who dies of AIDS at a time when the illness was hardly understood. The story is crafted as a look back by Allison, now in her late 40's and working as a cleaning woman. What disturbed me most is how the 80's model and party scene is depicted as utterly depressing, a place and time where young people drift through New York and LA, and everything is void - and, surprisingly, boring (and this is probably not what the text is trying to convey).
Allison's parents, the melancholic father who flees into music and her cheating mother, are wonderfully rendered, but Allison herself quickly bothered me as a person about whom I had to learn quite a bit that didn't captivate me: I wanted to learn more about Veronica, so for me, the book picked up in the last third, when she comes into a clearer focus. The women meet at an ad agency, where Veronica is a proof reader. And she is a complex female character: Not young, not beautiful, not cool, not successful, frequently degraded by her surroudnings - but in love with bisexual Duncan, who dies of AIDS. Then, Veronica gets the diagnosis and is abandoned by almost everyone she knows.
It is only then when Allison steps up to help her, and she struggles with complicated feelings towards Veronica. This is the interesting story here, not all the oh-so-shocking sex scenes, the unsurprising depiction of the 80's modeling world as predatory, or the minor characters that remain pale and forgettable. The pacing is off, and the cut-up style montage technique that is supposed to mirror random thoughts flashing through Allison's mind does not work: The effect is not intensity, but distraction. Hey, Gaitskill: Stop throwing random bits of info at me, I want to hear about Allison and Veronica, not some randos Allison dates and then doesn't date, and a sister who does stuff I've already forgotten (I just finished the book).
I want to hear more stories about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, including female perspectives, and I want to read more stories about non-conforming women and women who do not fulfill societal standards. But this ain't it, unfortunately.
Allison's parents, the melancholic father who flees into music and her cheating mother, are wonderfully rendered, but Allison herself quickly bothered me as a person about whom I had to learn quite a bit that didn't captivate me: I wanted to learn more about Veronica, so for me, the book picked up in the last third, when she comes into a clearer focus. The women meet at an ad agency, where Veronica is a proof reader. And she is a complex female character: Not young, not beautiful, not cool, not successful, frequently degraded by her surroudnings - but in love with bisexual Duncan, who dies of AIDS. Then, Veronica gets the diagnosis and is abandoned by almost everyone she knows.
It is only then when Allison steps up to help her, and she struggles with complicated feelings towards Veronica. This is the interesting story here, not all the oh-so-shocking sex scenes, the unsurprising depiction of the 80's modeling world as predatory, or the minor characters that remain pale and forgettable. The pacing is off, and the cut-up style montage technique that is supposed to mirror random thoughts flashing through Allison's mind does not work: The effect is not intensity, but distraction. Hey, Gaitskill: Stop throwing random bits of info at me, I want to hear about Allison and Veronica, not some randos Allison dates and then doesn't date, and a sister who does stuff I've already forgotten (I just finished the book).
I want to hear more stories about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, including female perspectives, and I want to read more stories about non-conforming women and women who do not fulfill societal standards. But this ain't it, unfortunately.
July 13, 2010
I bet I'd be really inspired by this novel if I were a fiction writer. Mary Gaitskill sees the world through no eyes but her own, and she communicates that worldview with an unyielding series of remarkably inventive metaphors and physical descriptions, interspersed with prose-poem reveries in which Gaitskill abandons standard literary psychology to focus entirely on texture. Heady stuff, and my inner creative-writing student is all fired up by it, galvanized. But alas, I am not a writer of fiction, merely a reader, with all the reader's selfish, automatic appetite for narrative conveyance. Gaitskill is less interested in moving from A to B than she is in wringing all the physical and emotional meaning out of A before collapsing, exhausted, onto B. Thus the book frustrated me as often as it thrilled me.
Semi-coincidentally, this is the second novel I've read this summer about a fashion model. While the protagonists of both Look at Me and Veronica are changed by the fashion world, I can't say that either book is really about modeling. Egan uses it as a vehicle to explore themes of identity and culture; Gaitskill seems interested in it more abstractly, as one source of the memories that protagonist-narrator Alison dips in and out of throughout the book. Veronica is most interesting in the last 50-70 pages, when the relationship between Alison and the titular character—a brassy old dame, sure to be played by Patricia Clarkson in a theoretical movie version, who's dying of AIDS—comes to the forefront. In this section, Gaitskill eases up on the prose-poem digressions and the non-linearity, as if to reward the reader's hard work by finishing up with a relatively conventional two-hander character piece. And it is devastating.
The reality of the '80s AIDS crisis is difficult to comprehend for those of us who are too young to have consciously lived through it. I'd never really given any serious thought to the matter until I saw HBO's great miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, and I thought about it again when I saw André Téchiné's great film The Witnesses. The genocidal cruelty of it, the fact that it was basically a holocaust wrought by nature to wipe out an already-persecuted group...one day you're a healthy young person living your life, and the next day you're dying of a mysterious disease and watching your friends die from it too, and meanwhile a big chunk of mainstream society is clucking its tongue and judging you for bringing it on yourself with your deviant behavior. It takes nuanced, sensitive art to help us understand the enormity of such a calamity, and I'd add Veronica to this shortlist of works that made AIDS real for me—all the more impressive since Gaitskill spends virtually no time dwelling on the physical nature of Veronica's illness. But the character herself, as seen through the memories of Alison, is vivid, and the act of watching Alison watch her die, rather than create distance, somehow makes the sadness of it more acute.
But again, all this stuff happens toward the end of the book, and the preceding pages are an uphill battle. Sometimes the book even verges on self-parody, and I rolled my eyes at more than a few of Gaitskill's overripe abstractions. So to evaluate the gestalt of the book I can't bring myself to give it more than three stars. Maybe I'm too tough a grader. (Or maybe I just gravitate toward the three-star rating too often out of equivocation; just as I don't have the guts to give this book four stars, I didn't have the guts to give Mitchell's Ghostwritten the two-star rating I really felt it deserved.) But I do think the work it demands the reader put it in is, largely, worthwhile; as an example of the book at its singular best, I reproduce this fantastic sentence: "He moves like he's being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with."
Semi-coincidentally, this is the second novel I've read this summer about a fashion model. While the protagonists of both Look at Me and Veronica are changed by the fashion world, I can't say that either book is really about modeling. Egan uses it as a vehicle to explore themes of identity and culture; Gaitskill seems interested in it more abstractly, as one source of the memories that protagonist-narrator Alison dips in and out of throughout the book. Veronica is most interesting in the last 50-70 pages, when the relationship between Alison and the titular character—a brassy old dame, sure to be played by Patricia Clarkson in a theoretical movie version, who's dying of AIDS—comes to the forefront. In this section, Gaitskill eases up on the prose-poem digressions and the non-linearity, as if to reward the reader's hard work by finishing up with a relatively conventional two-hander character piece. And it is devastating.
The reality of the '80s AIDS crisis is difficult to comprehend for those of us who are too young to have consciously lived through it. I'd never really given any serious thought to the matter until I saw HBO's great miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, and I thought about it again when I saw André Téchiné's great film The Witnesses. The genocidal cruelty of it, the fact that it was basically a holocaust wrought by nature to wipe out an already-persecuted group...one day you're a healthy young person living your life, and the next day you're dying of a mysterious disease and watching your friends die from it too, and meanwhile a big chunk of mainstream society is clucking its tongue and judging you for bringing it on yourself with your deviant behavior. It takes nuanced, sensitive art to help us understand the enormity of such a calamity, and I'd add Veronica to this shortlist of works that made AIDS real for me—all the more impressive since Gaitskill spends virtually no time dwelling on the physical nature of Veronica's illness. But the character herself, as seen through the memories of Alison, is vivid, and the act of watching Alison watch her die, rather than create distance, somehow makes the sadness of it more acute.
But again, all this stuff happens toward the end of the book, and the preceding pages are an uphill battle. Sometimes the book even verges on self-parody, and I rolled my eyes at more than a few of Gaitskill's overripe abstractions. So to evaluate the gestalt of the book I can't bring myself to give it more than three stars. Maybe I'm too tough a grader. (Or maybe I just gravitate toward the three-star rating too often out of equivocation; just as I don't have the guts to give this book four stars, I didn't have the guts to give Mitchell's Ghostwritten the two-star rating I really felt it deserved.) But I do think the work it demands the reader put it in is, largely, worthwhile; as an example of the book at its singular best, I reproduce this fantastic sentence: "He moves like he's being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with."
May 29, 2007
In Veronica, Alison, an aging model, whose body is wracked with pain and disease, looks back on her life in snapshots, as if she is flipping through a portfolio of memories. In her prime, Alison was beautiful and flawed. She related to the world with vanity, but also with a vague sadness and misunderstanding. She tells her stories as if her life is over in her 40s, which I guess for Alison, it is. The most telling of the flashbacks involve the title character, Veronica. Alison dislikes her and begrudgingly befriends her, but after Veronia finds out she has AIDS, Alison, out of both pity and self-aggrandizement, becomes one of the few friends to help her through the disease. The friendship has a shiny, photograpic quality, even as it deals with the fleshy horrors of AIDS. And Veronica, though the title character, is quite one-dimensional, relfecting the shallowness of Alison's view of her. Gaitskill's prose is beautiful and haunting. The reader is forced to look at the ugly side of physical beauty and the end-of-life sadness of a life lived, literally, in vain. This is not an uplifting book, but one that sheds light our cultural obsession with youth and beauty like nothing else I've read. I highly recommend it.
April 25, 2009
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.
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.
October 17, 2019
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 almost as shallow as Maude from Harold & Maude, and nearly as annoying. 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.
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 almost as shallow as Maude from Harold & Maude, and nearly as annoying. 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.
April 27, 2011
I read Veronica over the course of roughly 1.5 days (sleep, work, play also took up some time). It was addictive and mesmerizing and delirious and stunning and beautiful and expansive and breathless and depressing and hard and devastating and wonderful. Not everyone will love it and I've no trouble seeing why. Still, it really hit the spot for me.
The structure is linear but with lots of flashbacks and sometimes the transition from present to past is so smooth that you don't realize you were in the present day at the start of a paragraph, only to find yourself 2 decades in the past at the end of it. This isn't hard to follow if you can get into the flow of the writing and let it carry you.
The best thing about this novel is that it's very much alive. Even when it deals with death and decay, it manages to hum and pulsate with aliveness. It's not nihilistic, it's not ironic, it's not flippant. It's guttural and sometimes it guts you. But, sometimes it caresses and warms you with the loveliness of fleeting moments, deep love and small joys. This is largely due to the the sharp and precise beauty of Gaitskill's prose. It's in your face when it needs to be and allows you to take a step back (without ever keeping you at arm's length) when that's necessary. It knocks the wind out of you, but lets you get it back before socking you again.
The structure is linear but with lots of flashbacks and sometimes the transition from present to past is so smooth that you don't realize you were in the present day at the start of a paragraph, only to find yourself 2 decades in the past at the end of it. This isn't hard to follow if you can get into the flow of the writing and let it carry you.
The best thing about this novel is that it's very much alive. Even when it deals with death and decay, it manages to hum and pulsate with aliveness. It's not nihilistic, it's not ironic, it's not flippant. It's guttural and sometimes it guts you. But, sometimes it caresses and warms you with the loveliness of fleeting moments, deep love and small joys. This is largely due to the the sharp and precise beauty of Gaitskill's prose. It's in your face when it needs to be and allows you to take a step back (without ever keeping you at arm's length) when that's necessary. It knocks the wind out of you, but lets you get it back before socking you again.
January 17, 2016
I found this book so powerful that I couldn't write about it right away. I've had an ambivalent relationship to other work by Gaitskill (I'd only read her stories, not her other novel). I'm fascinated by it but sometimes repelled. The people and the situations often seemed ugly to the point that I wondered if an unconscious sadism wasn't at work. Then I'd wonder if that was only my squeamishness speaking. I also sometimes had trouble picturing her characters, who can be so contradictory that they don't even seem to cohere. Yet the writer's willingness to take on difficult subjects and difficult characters, and her strong prose, kept me interested in her work.
Now comes Veronica. While I was reading the novel, I felt really down. Perhaps it was the mood I was already in, or perhaps it was the book itself--some of both, probably. Yet I couldn't stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen to everyone, and how it was going to happen. I had to get more of those sentences. The poetry was relentless, beautiful, almost painful. Every page just bursting with unbelievable images. It was like a fever dream--which I guess was appropriate, since the main character suffers from fevers. And I felt more clearly than in Gaitskill's stories that there really is a compassion at work. I admire the hell out of this novel, and think Gaitskill has done something new here.
Now comes Veronica. While I was reading the novel, I felt really down. Perhaps it was the mood I was already in, or perhaps it was the book itself--some of both, probably. Yet I couldn't stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen to everyone, and how it was going to happen. I had to get more of those sentences. The poetry was relentless, beautiful, almost painful. Every page just bursting with unbelievable images. It was like a fever dream--which I guess was appropriate, since the main character suffers from fevers. And I felt more clearly than in Gaitskill's stories that there really is a compassion at work. I admire the hell out of this novel, and think Gaitskill has done something new here.
November 10, 2019
If you are looking for a dark, gritty book - look no further. Even though the story bounces from past to present in every chapter, once you get used to the writing style and can focus on the plot - watch out. The plot is intense, upsetting and wonderfully gloomy, all warped together. Lots to take in. For the most part it was an OK read. I enjoyed the darkness while catching the small glimpses of light. I did not enjoy the extra wordiness which constantly litters the narrative. I skimmed through those paragraphs and felt like I didn't loose anything by doing that. I was not able to feel any connections with any of the characters. They were all one dimensional and boring. Would I ever read this again - NO. Would I recommend this to anyone - NO. Did I get anything out of reading this - YES. Interesting plot - Definitely. Just fell flat for me in so many other areas.
June 22, 2014
I could read this book again and again, just to bask in the language. The writer/psychiatrist Oliver Sacks talks about a patient he had, an artist who could look at the world and see red. Not the way that you and I can. For her, red would separate from the landscape and all the other colors would drop away. She could glance at a field and instantly see a single red flower in a meadow of green. The rest of us could see that flower too, if we looked for it, if it was pointed out, but most of our brains would process that image entirely differently. We would see thousands of other things before we drilled down to that flower. By the time we got to it, it would be withered and brown. Mary Gaitskill finds words the way that woman found red. Like the best lyrical writers and poets she reinvents language and finds ways to express moments that are thrillingly unexpected. Reading this book made my heart beat faster. It's not for everyone. Readers who thrive on plot will tear their hair out. And those with delicate sensibilities should probably avoid Gaitskill altogether. But if you can find magic in the way a sentence is put together, this should be on your shelf.
November 19, 2023
A Novel Of Lurid Beauty
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 Francisco. 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 glamour 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 life. 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 naivety, 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 irresistible 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. 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
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 Francisco. 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 glamour 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 life. 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 naivety, 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 irresistible 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. 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
June 19, 2012
I loved this book for the writing alone. It's musical in the way certain bodies are muscial, even if the notes are wrong. It's more than stream of consciousness, it's stream of unconsiousness, revilement, love, hate, music, poetry, debauchery, lust, loss.
I did not really like the narrator character yet I couldn't put it down. I had no sympathy for her. Yet I envied her in a way. She was miserable and yet she didn't need to be. She didn't need to live the life she lived. She threw opportunities away and I hated her for that. I did enjoy Veronica. She was very New York, the way New York used to be.
This is not a linear novel. It's all over the place and that makes you pay attention. I like strange and poetic writing. Too bad the main character was complicit in her own misery.
I did not really like the narrator character yet I couldn't put it down. I had no sympathy for her. Yet I envied her in a way. She was miserable and yet she didn't need to be. She didn't need to live the life she lived. She threw opportunities away and I hated her for that. I did enjoy Veronica. She was very New York, the way New York used to be.
This is not a linear novel. It's all over the place and that makes you pay attention. I like strange and poetic writing. Too bad the main character was complicit in her own misery.
November 3, 2023
love, beautiful and grotesque all at once. couldn't stop thinking about it i very nearly stayed up till 3am just to finish it even though i wanted it to not be over as much as i needed to keep reading it. who else has done it like this
— "By the time I moved to New York, I had not prayed for many years. But there was a soft dark place where prayer had been and sometimes my mind wandered into it. Sometimes this place was restful and kind. Sometimes it was not. Sometimes when I went into it, I felt like a little piece of flesh chewed by giant teeth. I felt that everyone was being chewed. To ease my terror, I pictured beautiful cows with liquid eyes eating acres of grass with their great loose jaws. I said to myself, Don't be afraid. Everything is meant to be chewed, and also to keep making more flesh to be chewed. All prayer is prayer to the giant teeth. Maybe sometimes there is pity for the chewed thing, and that is what we pray to. Maybe sometimes there is love."
— "By the time I moved to New York, I had not prayed for many years. But there was a soft dark place where prayer had been and sometimes my mind wandered into it. Sometimes this place was restful and kind. Sometimes it was not. Sometimes when I went into it, I felt like a little piece of flesh chewed by giant teeth. I felt that everyone was being chewed. To ease my terror, I pictured beautiful cows with liquid eyes eating acres of grass with their great loose jaws. I said to myself, Don't be afraid. Everything is meant to be chewed, and also to keep making more flesh to be chewed. All prayer is prayer to the giant teeth. Maybe sometimes there is pity for the chewed thing, and that is what we pray to. Maybe sometimes there is love."
August 25, 2015
I almost didn't finish this book. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that I'd spent so much time just to get half way.
I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole with Alice, only Alice was an extremely unlikable character.
Too many metaphors that made no sense to me or probably anyone but the author.
Music plays a big part. Didn't understand how. The timeline goes from paragraph to paragraph skipping 20 years or more at a time. Sometimes every other sentence.
The main character, not Veronica by the way, is a miserable, hateful character and only cheers up in the last short paragraph.
Also, the author's photo on the book cover is freaky. I hope she's TRYING to be ironic...
I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole with Alice, only Alice was an extremely unlikable character.
Too many metaphors that made no sense to me or probably anyone but the author.
Music plays a big part. Didn't understand how. The timeline goes from paragraph to paragraph skipping 20 years or more at a time. Sometimes every other sentence.
The main character, not Veronica by the way, is a miserable, hateful character and only cheers up in the last short paragraph.
Also, the author's photo on the book cover is freaky. I hope she's TRYING to be ironic...
May 12, 2019
When this was good it was really good. Then the author almost seemed to lose herself in the metaphors. This story takes place in the 80’s and 90’s. The dark side of the glamour and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Many parts are so brilliantly rendered and then others where you’re left scratching your head. All in all I’m glad I read it.
February 14, 2025
Rereading this has cemented its status as one of my favorite books. Perhaps my all time favorite. Not because it is the best book ever written but because it hums so loud and beautifully I feel like it lives inside me, or at least I want it to.
November 26, 2023
the goodreads community is wrong about this book…..it’s devastatingly good
October 4, 2025
3.5⭐ rounded up
Veronica is a dazzling, aching portrait of a woman looking back on her life. The story follows Alison, once a beautiful model, now aging and ill. She remembers her life in fragments, from childhood memories to her friendship with an older woman named Veronica, who impacted her significantly.
The writing in this book is gorgeous. Gaitskill earns a great deal of praise from me just for her way with words. It is very slow paced, and full of reflection rather than much of a plot. I would not recommend it to those looking for an exciting story, but rather to someone looking to take the time and deeply immerse themselves in another’s mind. I’m glad I gave Gaitskill’s books another chance and I would definitely recommend this one over Bad Behavior.
Veronica is a dazzling, aching portrait of a woman looking back on her life. The story follows Alison, once a beautiful model, now aging and ill. She remembers her life in fragments, from childhood memories to her friendship with an older woman named Veronica, who impacted her significantly.
The writing in this book is gorgeous. Gaitskill earns a great deal of praise from me just for her way with words. It is very slow paced, and full of reflection rather than much of a plot. I would not recommend it to those looking for an exciting story, but rather to someone looking to take the time and deeply immerse themselves in another’s mind. I’m glad I gave Gaitskill’s books another chance and I would definitely recommend this one over Bad Behavior.
June 2, 2015
Really interesting book narrated by an aging former model. Love the author's ideas about dynamics between men and women, what people need and take from each other, and beauty vs. ugliness and how the two are intertwined and heighten each other. Find myself still thinking a lot about the book a week later.
I've been going my whole adult life thinking I've read Mary Gaitskill before because I hear her mentioned so much, but when I started reading this I realized I hadn't, because her language is so distinctive that I would have remembered it. Really visceral and somehow both spare and ornate at the same time. I guess because there is a ton of sensory description but the sentence construction is really simple and direct. The sensory description is so intense that at times I even thought it was nearing on maudlin and over-the-top, but somehow the narrator's sort of stark outlook undercuts the rococo-ness and the balance works in the end.
I will note that the narration jumps around in time and place a lot (between the narrator's childhood, youth spent modeling in Paris then New York, her friendship with a theatrical "cat lady" type named Veronica, and the present day) and I found it confusing to follow for the first 1/3 to 1/2. But eventually I got really sucked into the world and the voice and was on board for anything. And even with the confusion, I don't actually think that as an editor I would have even changed any of it.
Last thought is that the 5 stars is based on how much I enjoyed it and got out of it, but if I were rating based on how much I would recommend it to other people, I might actually go 3 stars because it was a very particular voice and reading experience that I think is probably not for everyone. But for me, am now excited to read pretty much every and anything else Gaitskill writes!
I've been going my whole adult life thinking I've read Mary Gaitskill before because I hear her mentioned so much, but when I started reading this I realized I hadn't, because her language is so distinctive that I would have remembered it. Really visceral and somehow both spare and ornate at the same time. I guess because there is a ton of sensory description but the sentence construction is really simple and direct. The sensory description is so intense that at times I even thought it was nearing on maudlin and over-the-top, but somehow the narrator's sort of stark outlook undercuts the rococo-ness and the balance works in the end.
I will note that the narration jumps around in time and place a lot (between the narrator's childhood, youth spent modeling in Paris then New York, her friendship with a theatrical "cat lady" type named Veronica, and the present day) and I found it confusing to follow for the first 1/3 to 1/2. But eventually I got really sucked into the world and the voice and was on board for anything. And even with the confusion, I don't actually think that as an editor I would have even changed any of it.
Last thought is that the 5 stars is based on how much I enjoyed it and got out of it, but if I were rating based on how much I would recommend it to other people, I might actually go 3 stars because it was a very particular voice and reading experience that I think is probably not for everyone. But for me, am now excited to read pretty much every and anything else Gaitskill writes!
August 12, 2009
I'm a true, dedicated, devoted fan of Mary Gaitskill--I will scout the 'Net for anything with her byline on it. Her words thrill me, her descriptions astound me, her observations leave me breathless. I've read every one of her stories several times. And even though I knew from the set-go that her first novel, Fat and Thin, isn't very good in terms of novel-writing (I actually think it fails), I still wanted to really, really like this book.
Unlike Fat and Thin (which nearly everyone agrees did not work), Veronica has received rave reviews (at least in the US--have not read the Brit ones yet), so I was hopeful and expectant though, to be honest, I wasn't thrilled by the storyline or the concept.
And i was right, because in the end, this novel that-isn't-a-novel (there you go, typical problems of so-called post modernism!) didn't grip me, left me cold, at times bored me, very often irritated me, and left me wondering just where had gone the awesome Mary Gaitskill voice I'd been following for years.
I've come to the conclusion that she's really a short-story writer, not a novelist.
Unlike Fat and Thin (which nearly everyone agrees did not work), Veronica has received rave reviews (at least in the US--have not read the Brit ones yet), so I was hopeful and expectant though, to be honest, I wasn't thrilled by the storyline or the concept.
And i was right, because in the end, this novel that-isn't-a-novel (there you go, typical problems of so-called post modernism!) didn't grip me, left me cold, at times bored me, very often irritated me, and left me wondering just where had gone the awesome Mary Gaitskill voice I'd been following for years.
I've come to the conclusion that she's really a short-story writer, not a novelist.
July 8, 2017
I approached this book wanting to like it (as Mary Gaitskill seems a fascinating person and writer), but much of the book was a struggle for me.
She writes beautifully, in a poetic-lens prose, of the narrator's childhood, modeling stint in Paris, and returning in NYC, interspersed with her unusual friendship to Veronica and how it shaped both their lives.
But the stream of conscious, shifting timelines, thoughts, and lack of driving plot took away from my reading experience. While there were often amazing scenes, moments of brilliance, and quite funny writing, it wasn't sustained enough for me to want to keep reading.
Some of the best stuff comes near the end as the main character focuses on the evolution of her relationship with Veronica and what it means for the both of them. She'd often say what many think and it was this insight and lack of filter which endeared me to both of these characters.
But I can see why Gaitskill may be a stronger short story writer, as this longer format didn't appeal too much to me as a reader.
She writes beautifully, in a poetic-lens prose, of the narrator's childhood, modeling stint in Paris, and returning in NYC, interspersed with her unusual friendship to Veronica and how it shaped both their lives.
But the stream of conscious, shifting timelines, thoughts, and lack of driving plot took away from my reading experience. While there were often amazing scenes, moments of brilliance, and quite funny writing, it wasn't sustained enough for me to want to keep reading.
Some of the best stuff comes near the end as the main character focuses on the evolution of her relationship with Veronica and what it means for the both of them. She'd often say what many think and it was this insight and lack of filter which endeared me to both of these characters.
But I can see why Gaitskill may be a stronger short story writer, as this longer format didn't appeal too much to me as a reader.
November 19, 2013
VERONICA is many things, but what struck me first was its rebuttal to the trite truism that we have only the moment we live in, that all else is illusionary and the present is where life is found. The past, even the future but less so, inhabit every page of this wonderful novel by Mary Gaitskill, like Al Jaffee's fold-up back cover of Mad magazine creating the full image only from parts. That's the picture, everything at once, forever churning through our consciousness. If time is the fourth dimension then there's no ruler for it, unmeasurable in its omnipresence. The characters lives are lived fragmented and sprinkled throughout the narrative, collecting like snow on a windowsill, visible only in volume that ironically doesn't obscure the view but clears it. All this is just window dressing, the frame for the story, which is sensory and beautiful and finally redemptive.
January 28, 2013
this book's full of ugly feelings brutal to recognize oneself within; also a lot of hope/beauty. not that ugly feelings need redemption via hope/beauty, just that it's an emotionally comprehensive novel. i had a hard time getting into it at first but then somehow it was everything. as a character, veronica stuns. <3
April 13, 2009
I really did not like this author or book. I struggled to read the first few chapters and found it very offensive. Others may not object to the language or content, but I did. I guess I'm finally old enough to put down a book I don't like!
March 8, 2025
i have half a mind to give this book a five for the writing alone. never have i come across such prose in my years of reading. truly floored me the way she concocts her sentences, the sparkling words she chooses. the words work brilliantly as do the eerily poignant, lush descriptions gaitskill writes of how people look, and how people look. sandwiched between dazzling vignettes are passages set in the present tense as alison mostly walks around; the scenery cleverly mirroring the emotional landscape of memories as alison recalls them. this book see-saws back and forth between ugly and beauty and ugly and beauty and ugly and beauty until you feel sick too.
December 17, 2023
Ja, interessante Frauencharaktere und so, aber unterm Strich war das doch eher öde, wenn man sonst Geschichten bevorzugt, die sich weit mehr trauen.
Mehr zum Buch in unserer ausführlichen Besprechung @ Papierstau Podcast: Folge 239: Geister-Gaslighting
Mehr zum Buch in unserer ausführlichen Besprechung @ Papierstau Podcast: Folge 239: Geister-Gaslighting
August 5, 2025
Lowkey it was not really about Veronica. Is that supposed to be her on the cover?
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