Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill – A Searingly Provoc
National Book Award Finalist's Crowning Achievement
Awarding winning author Mary Gaitskill is best known for her themes on cruelty, sex, desire, and beauty. In Veronica, a novel best described as beautiful, violent, and true, Gaitskill has penned a novel that is hauntingly beautiful.
The prose, nearly cathartic, will sear through you with its burning desire to be what it is: twisted, beautiful, grotesque, and graceful. The paragraphs like poems themselves ring true in their levels of frightening clarity. Each line is so well executed; they’ll lure you back with their expertise and emotional force.
Summary
Veronica, is a novel that depicts an era and time so readily to be deconstructed. The story takes a close look at a friendship between Alison and Veronica who meet during the nocturnal glamour of the 1980s New York. One is a young model, remolding herself after the wreck of her career, and the other is an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Without remorse, Gaitskill takes these two women on a journey that spans twenty years of friendship, taking their lives of narcissism and self-exploitation with tenderness and a skilled hand.
For much of this novel, the protagonist, Alison veers from present to past in a seamless commentary that is unabashed with pain. She takes us to her childhood where she lives through the streams of music, letting her life become a naked realm of purity, existing only in the abyssal of one song after the other.
Riding after the waves of the times, she runaways from home because that is the thing to do, and finds herself in San Francisco where she meets a model she doesn’t even recognize as beautiful. This ignorance and innocence is something Gaitskill explores with a deft hand as we find Alison swept into the industry she was never ready for.
Surging with beauty and ugliness, the undercurrent of these two themes is apparent when Alison is introduced to Veronica, a badly dressed older woman who’s dating a bisexual who makes her gravely ill by the end of the novel. In the story, the boyfriend, Duncan, and Veronica, are like two exploited people in a mutual world. He sleeps with other men while pretending to be faithful with her and it is this double standard that we see in the scene where the two are watching Camille together, repeating the lines to one another and masking their reality with the one on screen.
About the Author: Mary Gaitskill
With four books in over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has vicariously honed her gift to an amazing power. With language that is so powerful it could scathe you with its joy and striking prose, Gaitskill is among the best authors of our generation.
Mary Gaitskill is also the author of essays and short stories. 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).
Gaitskill, Mary
Veronica
Vintage Contemporaries
2005
0-375-72785
Veronica
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