Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon, 232 pp., $23
It would be irresponsible to discuss Mary Gaitskill’s newest book without first mentioning the language, which is thick and visceral, ornate but not merely decorative. Gaitskill has an unassailable mastery of figurative and descriptive language, and the reader leaves rooms knowing what they smell like, how they are lit, and what their inhabitants look like and seem like. While these things often aren’t pretty, the descriptions themselves are almost always beautiful. Gaitskill’s facility with the written word mostly compensates for the messiness of the novel’s plot.Veronica is narrated by an ailing ex-model named Alison, a woman who is described by her sister Daphne as walking through their house “like you’re alone on a beach. Like nobody’s there but you.” The description is apt in some ways; to others Alison is a cipher of sorts, remarkable only for her beauty in her younger years and, having lost that, somewhat invisible in the present. However, her inability to connect with those around her seems unintentional, and she is affected by others to the point where her own story seems to be the story of other people.
The narrative is delivered in memories over the course of one day and is chronologically jumbled and spontaneous in the way our own memories are. This lends the narrative a certain authenticity, but also a sense of convolution. Alison’s relationship with Veronica, a proofreader and former co-worker who is dying of AIDS, is the most central in the novel. There is a coherent and compelling story in Alison’s struggle to accept her, but one has to strain to see it through the static of less important plot lines. The profusion of other characters in Veronica, all of whom are described intricately and many who vanish with little consequence, makes them remarkably difficult to keep track of. They are often well-rendered and interesting, but their inclusion does not always seem necessary. This is the problem one encounters in Veronica and many first-person narratives: Do we see the storytelling as the responsibility of the novelist or of her character?
Veronica is a story, but it is also a character sketch, formed by the choices Alison makes in telling her story. If read as the former, it is frustrating and unsatisfying, and the epiphanic ending seems sudden and unearned. As the latter, Veronica is a very real depiction of a conflicted person, one who can by turns be self-centered or compassionate, lucid or delusional, honest or disingenuous, and precise or incoherent, just like anybody.
This article appears in November 11 • 2005.