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10th out of 16 books
—
9 voters
Veronica
The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by...more
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by...more
Hardcover, 240 pages
Published
October 11th 2005
by Pantheon
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Veronica by Mary Gaitskill came very highly recommended. It was on a lot of "best of" lists and I'd actually had it on my list of "To Read" for a while. This was a book that I couldn't finish and that is a real dilemma for me. When I'm not enjoying a book at all, I never know whether to quit or keep going. If I don't like it early on, I feel like I owe it to at least give it a chance, and keep reading. Eventually I'm half-way through and even if I still don't like it, I'm like, "Well, I'm half-w...more
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In Veronica, Alison, an aging model, whose body is wracked with pain and disease, looks back on her life in snapshots, as if she is flipping through a portfolio of memories. In her prime, Alison was beautiful and flawed. She related to the world with vanity, but also with a vague sadness and misunderstanding. She tells her stories as if her life is over in her 40s, which I guess for Alison, it is. The most telling of the flashbacks involve the title character, Veronica. Alison dislikes her and b...more
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Dec 10, 2008
Ciara
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
mary gaitskill fans, former models, HIV/AIDS advocates, people who partied in the 80s
let's see if i remember this properly: the titular veronica is a friend of the narrator. the narrator is a character herself. she got into modeling as a teenager & was very successful. she had a lot of jet-set excitement, dabbling in drugs & various rock stars, but beauty fades, especially when you spend the 80s on a non-stop coke binge. eventually she moves back to new jersey & takes a dead-end clerical job, where she meets veronica, a co-worker. veronica is a good ten years older t...more
After I finished Two Girls, Fat and Thin, I immediately went to the library to check this one out. Like in the previous novel, the story focuses on the friendship between two women. One is a model. The other is a middle-aged woman diagnosed with AIDS in the epidemic of the 80s.
It's hard not to see how Gaitskill is trying to highlight the similarities in the female experience. The ideas of beauty, youth, ugliness and love are not only totally upended, but sometimes exposed as something not even...more
It's hard not to see how Gaitskill is trying to highlight the similarities in the female experience. The ideas of beauty, youth, ugliness and love are not only totally upended, but sometimes exposed as something not even...more
Alison is an aging former model, going about her day of running errands and washing windows for a friend, observing the pain and change in her body from Hepatitis C and from a miss-set and improperly healed broken arm.
She remembers her early days as a drug-blurred 15 year old model in Paris and her return to New York. Mostly, she remembers her unlikely friendship with Veronica, a woman who loved opera, old movies, and her manipulative bisexual partner Duncan. Alison relives Veronica’s death from...more
She remembers her early days as a drug-blurred 15 year old model in Paris and her return to New York. Mostly, she remembers her unlikely friendship with Veronica, a woman who loved opera, old movies, and her manipulative bisexual partner Duncan. Alison relives Veronica’s death from...more
Veronica, published in 2005, is an uneven, “undisciplined” (as one reviewer put it) novel with a first-person narrator, Alison, who is a former model in her late 40s now sick with Hepatitis C and scraping by on a meager office-cleaning job. The novel is unusual, with a stream-of-consciousness style that moves the narrative disorientingly back and forth in time as Alison looks back on her exciting, debauched, youth and her unlikely friendship with an older woman, Veronica, who died of AIDS. Altho...more
Poetry prose is Veronica. Mary Gaitskill doesn’t write. She transcends. Raw, real, severe, cerebral, Gaitskill’s style haunts my world long after I’m done reading it for the morning. I’m running ahead of my reading schedule, which is good. I’m exactly halfway through the 257 page novel. These last few days I have stopped moving ahead in the story to revisit noteworthy passages. Upon dissection, it became evident to me how perplexing and magnificent the poetic quality of Mary Gaitskill’s words tr...more
Generally I'm not super into books dealing with the fraught life of models, the abuse and the drugs and the body image issues - all adds up to "don't become a model, and then I don't have to read about it." And "Veronica" had moments that I didn't care about. The narrator made bad decisions, that I wouldn't have made, and couldn't identify with, and they messed up her life. Don't sleep with coke addled modeling agents thirty years your senior. Don't run away from home for no reason. etc.
But som...more
But som...more
My favorite part of the book was the running motif of how in the tenth frame Veronica could look more beautiful every time. What I love about Gaitksill's writing is how stark it feels, how unsentimental it is, how no one is let off the hook for their thoughts and motivations. I mean, she really goes in there and gives every thought someone has, every ugly, unvarnished though and observation. So when I read Two Girls: Fat and Thin and Veronica I know I'm reading something kind of special and brav...more
A whiny, self-indulgant rant from a former model who reflects on her formerly glamorous lifestyle in the decaying light of her current circumstances; hobbled by hepatitis and cleaning offices for a living, she reflects back on an empty existence bereft of solid relationships or any real kind of emotional ties. Alison forges an unlikely friendship with Veronica, a former co-worker from a company where she temps; when Veronica contracts AIDS from her bisexual boyfriend, Alison becomes strangled by...more
I only read this book because Ineeded a book that started with the letter V for my alphabet challenge. The reviews on Amazon were extremely mixed, people seemed to really either love or hate this book. I can understand, as I definitely loved this book.
The story is told from the point of view of a woman in her 40s who was once very beautiful - a model in fact. She went through her teens and twenties traveling back and forth from Paris and San Francisco and had little to do with her middle class,...more
The story is told from the point of view of a woman in her 40s who was once very beautiful - a model in fact. She went through her teens and twenties traveling back and forth from Paris and San Francisco and had little to do with her middle class,...more
I found this book so powerful that I couldn't write about it right away. I've had an ambivalent relationship to other work by Gaitskill (I'd only read her stories, not her other novel). I'm fascinated by it but sometimes repelled. The people and the situations often seemed ugly to the point that I wondered if an unconscious sadism wasn't at work. Then I'd wonder if that was only my squeamishness speaking. I also sometimes had trouble picturing her characters, who can be so contradictory that the...more
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I'm a true, dedicated, devoted fan of Mary Gaitskill--I will scout the 'Net for anything with her byline on it. Her words thrill me, her descriptions astound me, her observations leave me breathless. I've read every one of her stories several times. And even though I knew from the set-go that her first novel, Fat and Thin, isn't very good in terms of novel-writing (I actually think it fails), I still wanted to really, really like this book.
Unlike Fat and Thin (which nearly everyone agrees did no...more
Unlike Fat and Thin (which nearly everyone agrees did no...more
Note: This is Kit's book.
Mary Gaitskill. Veronica. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Gaitskill is a disturbing writer. A good writer. But, after the first fifty pages, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read about her characters. The story is about Veronica, an eccentric New Yorker dying of AIDS. Her eccentricity is planned, nurtured, and born out of the need for attention. Her friend, Alison, is fifteen years younger, a model, and self-destructive. Well, so is Veronica. In the midst of all this self-dest...more
Mary Gaitskill. Veronica. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Gaitskill is a disturbing writer. A good writer. But, after the first fifty pages, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read about her characters. The story is about Veronica, an eccentric New Yorker dying of AIDS. Her eccentricity is planned, nurtured, and born out of the need for attention. Her friend, Alison, is fifteen years younger, a model, and self-destructive. Well, so is Veronica. In the midst of all this self-dest...more
This may be more of a fascinating failure than a resounding success... often, the connective tissue between the two story lines (the present day narrator, sick and aging, wandering in and out of places in her dingy California town, and flashbacks to her vibrant past as a model in the 70s and 80s) was too thin. The present tense parts were almost like something you'd read in a creative writing workshop--inward and indulgent, repetitive, sending us sailing into the far more compelling past without...more
There's no question, Mary Gaitskill is a brilliant writer. What impressed me the most was her poetic imagery. She has a unique spin on describing what her character feels, notices, and says. Her protagonist's relationship with Veronica and her father were particularly intriguing, and there I found she had some heart.But though I was impressed, I wondered why I found the book so easy to put down. At first, I thought it was because the main character seemed to fall into situations that didn't serv...more
I read Veronica over the course of roughly 1.5 days (sleep, work, play also took up some time). It was addictive and mesmerizing and delirious and stunning and beautiful and expansive and breathless and depressing and hard and devastating and wonderful. Not everyone will love it and I've no trouble seeing why. Still, it really hit the spot for me.
The structure is linear but with lots of flashbacks and sometimes the transition from present to past is so smooth that you don't realize you were in t...more
The structure is linear but with lots of flashbacks and sometimes the transition from present to past is so smooth that you don't realize you were in t...more
Feb 05, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine
added it
Ungainly. Gorgeously caustic. Full of celebrated repugnancies. Descriptions like these are not unusual for a Gaitskill novel. Even when writing about the fashion industry and its downside in this National Book Award finalist, Gaitskill (Two Girls, Fat and Thin, 1991) hones in on the dark, filthy underside of life. Unfortunately, the central friendship remains slightly out of focus throughout, and some critics faulted both the awkward structure and self-interested narrator. And while the Seattle
...more
As far as the story itself, I thought it was lackluster and a bit pretentious. I appreciated what Gaitskill was trying to do, that she was trying to explore notions of superficiality and depth when it comes to personal interactions. I also liked that she gave her two main characters, these women who are by turns pitiful and infuriatingly self-destructive, a sense of dignity even though they were behaving in ways I found really sad and upsetting. But for the most part, I thought she was striving...more
Hmmm. I keep thinking there was a lot more in the book than I got out of it. I think Anne and I will have to chat. I did enjoy the book as it went on. I found Gaitskill's evocation of Alison's "musical" view of life early on somewhat overdone. I did think she did a fabulous job of showing how the bright & shiny gets old & cranky. And Veronica, and her relationships, was a fantastic, complex but very real individual. Sometimes I think I read too fast . . . .
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Death, sex, transformations, hidden secrets, isolation, loyalty and extreme intuition: a Scorpio in a stereotypical nutshell. This is Alison, the story's protagonist (she tells us so when asked by a photographer at a photo shoot); this is how she experiences the world as she moves back and forth through memory, reconciling her life as a daughter, model, NYC temp/model, L.A. waitress/model, an office cleaning ex-model, and, namely, friend of Veronica, a woman 16 years her senior who dies of AIDS....more
It's slow moving in parts. If you want an existential novel about aids, modeling, sex, music, and regret, then this is the book for you. Gaitskill has a really unique way of describing what people are saying with their bodies, particularly their eyes. She has a slightly sober, cynical way of looking at the world, which can get a little sad to read through, but it's an interesting, eloquent, well written, demanding book.
Someone thought i would like this book, and gave it to me, and i love when that happens. It means i'm floating around in a random brain sometime that causes an action that has the end result of someone giving me a book. The authors name was chipping away at me, i think i must have read one of her short stories somewhere. She would be really great at short stories. This was a good story, and the theme that runs throughout is one i've spent a lot of time thinking about... This was actually between...more
I bet I'd be really inspired by this novel if I were a fiction writer. Mary Gaitskill sees the world through no eyes but her own, and she communicates that worldview with an unyielding series of remarkably inventive metaphors and physical descriptions, interspersed with prose-poem reveries in which Gaitskill abandons standard literary psychology to focus entirely on texture. Heady stuff, and my inner creative-writing student is all fired up by it, galvanized. But alas, I am not a writer of ficti...more
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it reminded me a lot of like being killed (book #30), but it was a lot easier to read and to like the characters. it's a portrait of a woman reflecting on her destructive lifestyle as a model when she was younger and her friendship with an older, unglamorous woman with hiv. what i liked was the way the book captured allison and her friend and sisters' different coping mechanisms for life.
Everyone told me to read the Gaitskill novel about the escort, so now I *am* readong it. I loved _two girls..._, after all--it even made an Ayn Randoid sympathetic. Courtesy of my friend Kim lending it to me.
**
So I guess I avoided reading this book for a while, b/c it was The Mary Gaitskill Book About The Escort Caty Should Read. Actually,it's the Mary Gaitskill Book About The Model, but it does have quite a bit to say about prostitution. Gaitskill has really grown into her style, in painting he...more
**
So I guess I avoided reading this book for a while, b/c it was The Mary Gaitskill Book About The Escort Caty Should Read. Actually,it's the Mary Gaitskill Book About The Model, but it does have quite a bit to say about prostitution. Gaitskill has really grown into her style, in painting he...more
I really enjoyed Gaitskill's short story collection, 'Bad Behavior,' and this novel-length effort was a disappointment in comparison. The writing felt very self-conscious, and perhaps like she had just finished something by Lorrie Moore before putting pen to paper. The tangibility of beauty and ugliness that is so vivid in her short stories is absent here despite her palpable attempts to capture it, and the heroine is more a vessel for detached-seeming meditations than a remotely empathetic char...more
Alison, a washed up, ailing model in her late forties recounts her life across continents and her friendship with Veronica, an eccentric older woman she meets temping in NYC. This is a somewhat disorganized and depressing novel - at times the narrator switches time periods between paragraphs, but sometimes the writing makes up for what it lacks in structure. At times it is poetic, sometimes lyrical and her 80s sequences are descriptie; Gaitskill is a good writer but at times it is overblown and...more
I rarely write reviews, but feel compelled to say something about this book to my few friends who might read this(not necessarily anyone else). I'm marking this as 3 stars, but feel the need to qualify my rating by saying that I would give it 4 stars for the writing quality and for what the author was trying to accomplish with it--it's well and interestingly written, but 2 stars for the way that I responded to it overall. So if I split the difference I arrive at 3 stars.
That being said, it's ha...more
That being said, it's ha...more
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Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. 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). She married writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. As of 2005, she lived in New York City; Gaitskill has previously lived in Toronto, San Francisco, and Marin County, CA, as...more
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“Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.”
—
11 people liked it
“What are you thinking?” She asks.
-That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.”
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5 people liked it
More quotes…
-That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.”
