VERONICA By Mary Gaitskill

I’m working my way back through all of the books I missed out on when my kids were too young and needy for sustained concentration.  The best way to do it, I figured, was to stick with the top books of each year.  Luckily the New York Times best books list is easily accessible on line: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/review/tenbest.html That’s how I discovered Mary Gaitskill’s breathtaking book: Veronica.

            A short synopsis does this book no justice but I’ll lay it out for you anyway:  The narrator, Alison, is a former model who is suffering from Hepatitis C and is taking a feverish hike up a California mountain recalling her glory days and her friendship with a frumpy middle aged woman named Veronica who was involved with a mean-spirited bisexual named Duncan through whom she contracted AIDS. 

            If I told you that Alison alternately longs for and abhors her past or that she’s now learned that her glamorous life was false and that the only true friendship she ever had was the one that wasn’t skin deep, it would be true on the surface.  But the real joy in this book and the revelations that accompany it are apprehended not because of any overt didacticism but because of Gaitskill’s precise, unique and glittering prose.  Even though I wanted to read this whole novel in one sitting, there’s so much rich language to absorb that in the end I had to slow down in order to savor it.   

            The novel begins with Alison sick and middle aged, cleaning her former lover’s office for extra money.  She lives in a neighborhood of “blunt, faceless buildings that are too much trouble to tear down.” Her neighbor Rita also suffers from Hepatitis C and both of them are appalled at their third neighbor “Fat Freddie” who every morning leaps into the San Rafael Canal in front of their apartment building and “attacks the water with big pawing strokes, burying his face in it like he’s trying to eat it out.” This despite the fact that Rita thinks the water is no better than a public toilet.

            This—surprisingly—is the perfect segue for Alison to start reminiscing about her days as a model.  The world of modeling it turns out is like leaping into turd-filled water. There she meets women who are beautiful on the outside but underneath their faces are wild “like something inside was crashing together and breaking and crashing again.”  She enters into it by “fucking a nobody catalog agent who grabbed my crotch.” The next thing she knows she’s in Paris living with the head of the Celeste modeling agency and she has turned “into a puppet with a giant hand inside me.” Her boyfriend soon throws her out of the swank apartment on the Rue de Temple he had provided for her and, to top it off, steals all of her money.

            She returns to Manhattan where she gets a job through a temp agency and meets Veronica, dressed in “a plaid suit, ruffled blouse and bow tie, like a human cuckoo clock.”  When she tells Veronica all of her modeling sob stories Veronica says:  “Every pretty girl has a story like that, hon.” Basically, suck it up.  Alison returns to modeling determined not to let anyone grab her crotch.  And she doesn’t.  Still the world slaps her around: she walks in on one boyfriend making “model airplanes with a fourteen year old girl.” Her next boyfriend, a writer, loves and then ridicules her for her mindless occupation.

Veronica is the person who opens the world up for Alison showing her that none of it is personal; that beauty is a commodity to be used either by the person with it or by those who want to exploit it or both. The choice is hers.  Or is it? In a way that’s the point of the whole novel.  We are dealt our cards and they take us where they take us.  If we’re beautiful like Alison there will be people who want to use us up, if we are used up like Veronica we are easily forgotten.  Then again the message might be that we all turn into Veronica.  Alison perceives this during her blooming youth but it is only later when she is standing in Veronica’s shoes that she fully appreciates it.  Only then does she begin to look with clarity on her parent’s claustrophobic marriage, her sisters striated choices, their anger and jealousy, Veronica’s sickness and deterioration and all the youthful, beautiful people that will do anything to avoid clashing up against these truths.  In those naive days she had argued with her father about choices: “I made fun of him when he talked as if he didn’t have any.” Later she realizes perhaps he didn’t.  

Veronica dies alone as we infer Alison probably will in the near future with her neighbor still leaping riotously into the turds outside her window.  Alison returns home from her hike noting that “the sun is bright and warm even through the wet trees.” She is reminded of her mother’s last words which she whispers to each of her three daughters:  “You are my most beautiful.” Each blade of grass, Alison decides, is beautiful to the one who made it and perhaps, she might have added, to the ones who bother to look.     

            http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=9575