Veronica (Paperback)

“When I was nine,” says Dorothy Never, one of the titular characters in Mary Gaitskill’s first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, “I read ‘The Little Match Girl,’ the fairy tale about a starving child who freezes to death outside the home of a middle-class family as they eat Christmas dinner. I read with growing horror as it became clear that no elf or genie was going to appear to take her to a magic land or grant her wishes. She used the last of her pathetic matches to warm her fingers and finally lay down in the snow to die.” Dorothy is by nature a sentimentalist; she retreats from the story of the Little Match Girl because it does not provide her with the comfort of the happy ending she so desperately craves. Her repulsion at the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale is in large measure a response to its very lack of sentimentality, a lack that is central to the sensibility of her creator.
The story of the Little Match Girl reappears in a different context in Gaitskill’s second novel, Veronica. At age sixteen, Alison, the book’s narrator, leaves home over the protestations of her parents and ends up selling flowers on the streets of San Francisco: “The go-go clubs didn’t let me in, but I could hang out in front, talking with the bouncer and warming myself in the heat from the door. Men would say, ‘Here’s the Little Match Girl!’ and drop bills in my basket without taking anything. There were huge neon signs above us, a big red one of an apple and a snake and a naked woman with big tits."
The imagery here is subtle and ambiguous: the ultimate fate of the Little Match Girl in the fairy tale-her freezing to death in the snow-is left unspoken, and there is a gesture of faint goodwill on the part of the men who give Alison money without taking anything from her in return. (Not all the men in the novel are so altruistic: Alison’s physical beauty becomes simultaneously an asset in advancing her career as a model, and a temptation for the rapacious males with whom she comes in contact.) But the image of the big red neon sign with the apple and the snake is somewhat less ambiguous, pointing as it does to a fallen world, and explicitly connecting that fallen world to an image of “a naked woman with big tits.”
This shifting ground is typical of Gaitskill’s approach in the novel, which is rife with tensions-many of them unresolved-between the antipodes of beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, the sacred and the profane. In her forties, Alison, who suffers from Hepatitis C, works as a housekeeper for John, a photographer who in the past shot her for fashion magazines. Now that she has lost her looks, John employs her to clean his toilet as an act of pity, albeit one that “just got fit into the friendship” he maintains with Alison.

“What can’t get fit in is that sometimes even now John looks at me and sees a beautiful girl in a ruined face. It’s broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks, but it’s there, and it pisses him off. It pisses me off, too. When we have these fights and he hears crying and hurt in my voice, it’s a different version of that ruined beauty, except it’s not something he can see, so he can’t think ruined or beauty. He just feels it, like sex when it’s disgusting but you want it anyway.”

Unable to reconcile the conflicting notions of “ruin” and “beauty” in his mind, John reacts to Alison with anger and confusion. His inability to see in Alison the complexities and tensions that exist alongside one another is a function of the two-dimensional way he perceives the world, through the lens of a camera. This aspect of his character is underscored the first time he shoots Alison, when he is described as looking “like a cardboard display of a friendly person.”
Alison, by contrast, cannot escape the recognition that opposing forces can coexist within a single person. This recognition informs and motivates her response to Veronica, an HIV-positive proofreader at an ad agency where Alison finds employment. Veronica is a film buff who revels in her self-appointed status as an aesthete and disdains anything vaguely populist: “As we walked past a line of people waiting to see the other movie, Veronica said loudly, ‘They don’t want to see anything challenging. They’d rather see Flashdance. Now me, if it’s bizarre, I’m interested.’”
Veronica’s use of the word “bizarre” is echoed later in the novel by Patrick, a writer with whom Alison has an affair. After a chance meeting at Alison’s apartment, Patrick conveys to Alison his impression that Veronica is “just vibrating with bizarreness.” Although she can’t bring herself to answer Patrick at the time, years later Alison admits to herself that Patrick was right, although, like John’s response to her own ruined beauty, he hadn’t been able to make the intuitive leap beyond Veronica’s surface “bizarreness” to the turmoil beneath: “She was in pain and she was all alone. That can make a person bizarre.”
Alison is unable to abandon Veronica once the latter is diagnosed with HIV, precisely because she is so attuned to the antipodal forces at war within the other woman. “It’s so great of you to stand by her,” says an acquaintance. “It’s great and brave.” Alison’s bravery, we come to understand, is a consequence of her worldview, which is set in opposition to those figures-mostly men-whose worldviews are constricted or deficient. Alison’s own father, watching a TV documentary on AIDS one Christmas, reacts with horror and disgust: “Everyone knows they’re diseased . . . We don’t need it shoved in our faces.”
Gaitskill’s bravery, her triumph, in Veronica as in her earlier novel and two short-story collections, is her resolute refusal to turn a blind eye to reality, but instead to treat the world honestly, in all of its ambiguous complexity, its muddiness and beauty. In Veronica she has found a perfect formal outlet for her vision: the novel utilises the motif and tactics of a fairy tale, and the author fractures the chronology of her story, so that scenes resonate with each other and deepen our understanding as we proceed through the narrative.
The result is that the novel feels more like a dream than a conventional story; the reader experiences the book in much the same way Alison describes experiencing her life: “It’s like I get sucked out of normal life into a place where the order of things is changed; it’s still my life and I recognize it, but the people and places in it are sliding around indiscriminately.”
In his novel, Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov has his narrator observe, “ . . . I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it . . . ” Gaitskill has made manifest this notion in the waking dream that is her novel. It is a potent, hallucinatory experience, told with startling lucidity, lyricism, and honesty. It is something close to a masterpiece.
Steven W. Beattie (Books in Canada)
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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.
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