- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (July 18 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 037572785X
- ISBN-13: 978-0375727856
- Product Dimensions: 13 x 1.8 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #313,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Gaitskill writes sexually frank and emotionally scouring tales of women on the verge and in the abyss, including her first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991). Here, she again posits an improbable alliance between two women who, for all their differences, share a renegade spirit. Alison, the intriguingly ambivalent narrator, discovers at an early age that her prettiness gives her power and leaves her vulnerable. She stumbles into modeling, barely survives a decadent interlude in Paris, then ends up in New York, worried that her modeling days are over. She takes a night-shift temp job and meets Veronica, who is older, unbeautiful, not hip, and joltingly cynical. Duncan, the love of Veronica's life, is a rampantly unfaithful bisexual who infects her with AIDS. Gaitskill perfectly evokes the ambience of the 1970s and 1980s: the trance of pop music, the ubiquitous drugs, fashion's sadomasochistic bent, the lust for wealth, and the quiet terror of AIDS. And, harmonizing with Jennifer Egan, Julie Hecht, and Amy Bloom, she zeros in on the vagaries of the mind as she considers beauty and disease, betrayal and loyalty, and fear and compassion in a raw-nerves novel that is at once elegiac, funny, and life affirming. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific,
This review is from: Veronica (Paperback)
This is a terrific book, though not for the easily offended (language, sex, drugs), or for people who are put off by ornate writing. However, if you like Mary Gaitskill, I think that this book is strictly speaking a better novel than Two Girls Fat and Thin (not to say that I didn't like that one, too). The character of Alison is so convincing ... there are so many people whose lives just seem to happen to them.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.4 out of 5 stars (75 customer reviews) 22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hurtling Towards Self-destruction,
By J. Marren "jtm497" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Veronica (Paperback)
"Veronica" is a complex portrait of a typical suburban girl, restless and bored, disaffected, scornful of the ordinary world around her. Yet Allison has incredible beauty and dabbles in modeling. She casually agrees to have her photos entered in a contest, and she is instantly catapulted into a world of money, drugs and brutal sex. The assurances of proper supervision given to her parents were nonsense, and she becomes the lover of Europe's most powerful agent. It all falls apart, of course; she returns home, tries to finish school, but is inevitably drawn to her former life. She misses her abusive agent, the drugs, the money, the glamour, all the things that almost destroyed her. When we last see her she is older, sick and alone.Having said that, the book is nothing like that at all. It takes place in a day, as the middle aged Allison drags herself to work as a cleaning person, visits friends and trudges up a mountain in the rain to tire herself out so she can sleep. As she moves through this ordinary, dreary day, her mind skips back to the past, her glamorous and painful life, but most of all to Veronica. Veronica is an improbable friend for the then-elegant Allison; she's boistrous, badly dressed, and embarrasses Allison in public. Yet Veronica emerges as the only person Allison cares about. In the end, she realizes that Veronica saved her by allowing the cold Allison to pity her, and thus become human. It's a redemption of sorts, as Allison faces her own illness and death. This is a difficult book to read and to write about! Gaitskill gives us a detailed, painful look at the world of modeling--talk about pity! And at times she is a wonderful writer. Allison is sitting on a bus looking down at a car below: "I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain." But at times I found it slow going, a bit overwritten. And the lives Gaitskill focuses on are destructive, hard and cruel. Allison's world is far from a kind one, and the "gratitude and joy" she feels towards Veronica after Veronica's death is the only gleam of light we see. "Veronica" wons many awards and lots of praise, I imagine for its writing and cold-eyed view of a hard world. But be prepared. 37 of 42 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling and repellent,
By A Reader - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Veronica: A Novel (Hardcover)
What a strange book. I had never read Mary Gaitskill -- a friend bought this for me after we both read the article about her in the New York Times. I found her writing style compelling and unique, but sometimes irritating. Her character observances cut to the bone very swiftly, but there are occasions when she seems to spin out in a vortex of meaningless poetical whatever, and then I would have to just skip the paragraph altogether. I would often have to reread something over and over again to get its meaning; sometimes I would finally grasp what she was getting at (and feel illuminated and really impressed by the knife-point of her skill), and other times she just lost me. The story is very dark and rather hopeless until the final paragraph (I'm still not sure how Alison comes to this final moment of redemption; I think it might be another Gaitskill poetical spin-out). I'm not sure why I should care about anything that went on in the story, but she did pull me in. Gaitskill's craft is in the tightness and economy of her character observations, her vivid fractions and moments. And yet I wasn't able to really 'see' Paris or New York (the characters could have been anywhere) and I'm not even convinced that Gaitskill came to know the modelling world of which she wrote. (I'm not convinced she's familiar with the HIV world either, though I might be wrong about that). Highly ambivalent about this book, obviously.
32 of 38 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tom Casey reviews VERONICA,
By Tom Casey "Tom Casey" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Veronica: A Novel (Hardcover)
I can think of no author since Virginia Woolf, and no book since Mrs. Dalloway, that achieves what Woolf called transparency as brilliantly as Mary Gaitskill has achieved it in her novel, Veronica. By transparency, Woolf meant a portrait of whole character; mind, feeling, past, present, motility; the process of thought and action by which we make our way in the world each day, the manner in which we absorb life around us and make emotions that teeter at the edge of sanity coherent; how we come to understand our fragile place in the world.Mary Gaitskill's uncanny sense of how uneven life can be drives a narrative without rules, a story told according to the way we think, this impression or that triggering a memory, an impulse, or something more inchoate; a feeling not yet fully formed or half forgotten, an impression of the world made from a father's unfallen tears in a moment of frightening epiphany. Mary Gaitskill's novel is not about moral judgment, injury, guilt, forgiveness, or fate, it is about life: what it feel like to navigate the days, months, and years using what gifts we may have, surviving our follies, learning to face the truth about aging and mortality, and maybe gaining wisdom. Alison may at first seem cold, somewhat passive and naïve, until we reflect that she is a teenage girl of uncommon attractiveness who has run away from home into a world of predators. She finds her way into a modeling career and copes with the advantages and pitfalls of sudden success, discovering a cycle of exploitation, rejection, and finally, failure. She leaves that flamboyant career and eventually finds a position as a word-processing temp for an advertising firm working the night shift. There she meets Veronica. Veronica is like those people who come into our lives through the back door, so to speak, and never leave. They are those friends we have that we often don't think of as friends, exactly. They are those irregulars who, for some reason, take notice of us; we keep them at a certain distance, we hear their stories, we don't approve of them, yet something about their vulnerability gives us courage to accept our humanity, and over time we discover that in this oblique connection we have learned something about love. This is a very incomplete description what Gaitskill has created. Her story is a kaleidoscope of sensations and reflections taken from the myriad faces one meets in a lifetime of large and slight import, and those experiences, good and bad, that we have had and that others have had, from which at last we begin to draw conclusions about the world and find meaning for our lives. Mary Gaitskill's Veronica is a work of fiction carried to the level of art, something very rare indeed. |
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