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Veronica

Name: Veronica
Author: Mary Gaitskill
ISBN: 9780375727856

by Mary Gaitskill

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Overview

Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: 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.

Synopsis

A National Book Award Finalist An ALA Notable Book The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of BAD BEHAVIOR and TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN, VERONICA is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.

As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years." Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also...

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Meghan O'Rourke

… Gaitskill is reaching further into her preoccupations than ever before, and the novel is full of very real pleasures. Her prose has a perfumed clarity. She tacks against the upright dichotomies of our historical moment - dichotomies that shape how we think and who we are but are often more contingent than we know. In Veronica, as ever, Gaitskill's brand of brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace, is unlike anyone else's. And it constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around.

About the Author, Mary Gaitskill

From short stories like the S&M-tinged "Secretary" (the inspiration for the indie film of the same name) to her 2005 National Book Award-nominated novel, Veronica, Mary Gaitskill's words are often etched on a dark canvas -- but still manage to illuminate. "Gaitskill is an unforgiving writer, harsh, caustic and raw," reads the National Book Award judges' citation. "All that masks the enormous accomplishment of her work, the ability to use the dark to cast light."

Reviews

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Editorials

Janet Maslin

Mary Gaitskill's fierce, night-blooming new novel is about a close friendship between two women. But it should not be confused with anything cozy. Imagine a buddy story from the mind of William S. Burroughs, illustrated with images by Robert Mapplethorpe or David Cronenberg, and you get some idea of the tenderness to be found here…Beauty and ugliness do battle in Veronica, not only within the minds of its tormented characters but also on the page. Ms. Gaitskill writes so radiantly about violent self-loathing that the very incongruousness of her language has shocking power.
—The New York Times

Meghan O'Rourke

David Jays

Gaitskill's implacable refusal of sentimentality is her great strength -- no group hugs here, just baleful understanding.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Gaitskill begins her bittersweet novel of the friendship between fashion model Alison and the older HIV+ Veronica (whose looks and habits are totally alien to Alison's stylish world) years later when Alison is older and feeling her body slowly decay. While the book follows Alison's younger self as she prances about Paris catwalks and New York nightclubs, the knowledge that she ends up lonely and broken-spirited casts a pall over the telling of those glittering earlier days. Mazur plays on this well, giving Alison a weary yet wistful tone that conveys the weight of her self-loathing. For Veronica's lines, she skillfully alters her voice to be the "bitterly inflected instrument" Gaitskill describes: nasal, almost braying, but direct and honest in contrast to the timidity and insincerity of Alison's words. The narration can be disorienting as it slips from grim present to various points in the past, but that works to the story's advantage, making all the perspectives bleed together, infusing the whole with sadness. Bleak but compelling, the book affords listeners a wonderfully nuanced glimpse inside a damaged psyche. Simultaneous release with the Vintage paperback (Reviews, Aug. 1, 2005). (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In her first novel in ten years, Gaitskill (Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin) offers an ode to the complex feelings that manifest in women's friendships. When Alison, a fashion model recovering from a stint on the Paris runway, meets Veronica, she is immediately drawn to the older woman's quirky irreverence. As the two become closer, Alison is pulled into Veronica's colorful, if often dysfunctional, world. Although Gaitskill's protagonists are perfectly hewn, a host of ancillary characters adds heft to the story. What's more, the excesses of the 1980s-including sex and drugs-give a rich patina to the world of the hip and their imitators. Sadly, the nonstop party ends when Veronica contracts AIDS. Much of the narrative takes place on a single day in which a now middle-aged Alison reflects on her life via an onslaught of flashbacks. While this time frame stretches credibility, the novel is so well wrought that it barely matters. Beautifully and sensitively crafted, Gaitskill's return is highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/05.]-Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Gaitskill, whose story "Secretary" was made into a 2002 film of the same name, returns with this ravishing novel about a friendship between a young fashion model and an unattractive older woman dying of AIDS. Alison Owen is a 36-year-old former runway model now enduring the consequences of her teenage debut in the fashion industry. She occasionally works as a cleaning woman, but mostly lives on disability-the result of an auto accident that brought the last phase of her diminishing career to an end. Insomnia, the codeine she takes to relieve the chronic pain of her ruined rotator cuff and recurrent fevers (symptoms of advancing hepatitis-C) combine to transform her waking consciousness into a lush kaleidoscope of memory: international fashion shoots; her Parisian chauffeur-lover, Rene; the paranoid agency head, Alain, who took her as his mistress and then absconded with her Swiss bank account; her mother's deathbed; her father's anguish while listening to Rigoletto; the catalogue agent who raped her at 17; Jersey boys from her hometown; a naked man on a leash in an S&M club; her Jay McInerney-like boyfriend in New York's booming '80s social scene. But most of all, she remembers Veronica, the abrasive older woman she met against the backdrop of a Manhattan that was just learning about AIDS (and still believing women were immune). Veronica, who reacts dispassionately to Alison's confessions of her past, is an unerring proofreader (her motto: "Still Anal After All These Years")-one of the army of over-educated clerical workers who mine the night shifts of law firms and big business to fund their screw-the-system lives. Her friends are all literate gay men; her bisexual lover is Duncan, whoeventually succumbs to AIDS. Veronica and Alison were not lovers, hardly even friends, but they haunted each other, and somehow, as Gaitskill devastatingly illustrates, they made each other whole. A gorgeous, articulate novel that is at once an unflinching meditation on degradation and a paean to deliverance.