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Apr 12, 2008

Kalisa rated it:

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 lik More...

3 comments like (11 people liked it)

May 29, 2007

Holly rated it:

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...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 10, 2008

Ciara rated it:

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 than the narr More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 20, 2008

Daisy rated it:

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 somethi More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Bronwen rated it:

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’ More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 25, 2011

N. rated it:

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...

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Nov 26, 2011

Jack rated it:

I mean, I fight my middle age at every turn. But some days you're just cranky about things - younger writers, younger people. Younger subjects. Mary Gaitskill can bring out the crank in anyone. Or maybe just anyone my age. She is a terrific writer, and an adept wordsmith. And I sorta hated this book, and knew I should like it more.

Our heroine, Alison, is a terminally jaded young woman - her mother left her father, she's been a model and lived in Europe and failed at everyth More...

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Aug 10, 2011

Stefani rated it:

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 b More...

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Aug 28, 2010

Agnes rated it:

I only read this book because I needed 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 m More...

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Jan 21, 2010

Pamela rated it:

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...

2 comments like

Jan 14, 2010

Susan rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Aug 12, 2009

Maia rated it:

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 a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 18, 2009

Deidre rated it:

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 More...

2 comments like

Jun 10, 2009

Alanna rated it:

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...

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Apr 27, 2011

See Elle Oh rated it:

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 y More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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

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Apr 25, 2009

Caitlin rated it:

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 strivi More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2009

Elaine rated it:

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 . . . .

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Mar 15, 2011

Marisela rated it:

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...

4 comments like

Jan 30, 2008

Sylvie rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 20, 2011

Rachel rated it:

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...

2 comments like

Jul 13, 2010

Krok Zero rated it:

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...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 16, 2011

Lucy rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 26, 2009

Caty rated it:

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 More...

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Aug 29, 2011

Holly rated it:

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 s More...

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Aug 24, 2011

Emily is currently reading it

I picked up Mary Gaitskill's 2006 novel Veronica as part of my ongoing disgust project, and indeed it is a rich depository of fascinating uses of disgust. Yet I find I can't bear to write simply about the disgust in the book, without addressing its greater appeal. I consciously avoid pronouncements about the Canon, which books are Great and which merely Good, or anything of the kind—and yet, I am beset by a strong desire that Veronica be studied, written about, appreciated, revisited. It is n More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 20, 2009

Caitlin rated it:

After being totally wowed by Bad Behavior (Gaitskill's short story collection from the 80's), this book inevitably let me down.

Veronica is a middle-aged woman dying of an AIDS related illness, which she contracted from her bisexual boyfriend (who was not faithful to her). Alison (the narrator) is a younger woman who meets Veronica at her temp job (some strange office where they do late-nite typing?). An unlikely friendship strikes up between the two, and would have dissolved if Veron More...

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Aug 06, 2011

Ron rated it:

The first half of the book is almost wholly incoherent and discursive, and Gaitskill falls back on the familiar shocks of her short fiction in a way that can only be described as forced and contrived. The second half delivers a more focused narrative that almost redeems the book, but one gets the sense that she is the sort of thinker who cannot see the big picture. The book reads a bit like very short versions of her stories, random fragments strung together with no consideration of the whole. O More...

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Dec 07, 2010

Jordan added it

Gaitskill is a more effective short story writer than novelist. She is talented at omitting, at providing the glimpse. Unlike those in BAD BEHAVIOR, VERONICA's characters fail to cohere. I never cared much for the palely sketched narrator, a fashion model turned harborer of hepatitis-C, the novel's Nick Carraway or Charles Ryder. I also never cared for Veronica, the novel's Jay Gatsby or Sebastien Flyte, who lacks intrigue and is difficult to regard romantically. Still, I got caught up in t More...

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Jul 28, 2009

Alisa rated it:

In 9 of out 10 pictures I hated this book. But in the tenth, I loved it...

This is not at all the book expected based on all the reviews and descriptions I read. I was expecting something brittle, cynical, knowing. Something social and tight. The models, the New York, the Eighties... I put off reading it for a long time because of that.

I don't blame reviewers too much - how could they get across how loopy, how interior, how deep and dense and mesmerizing this is, but --wo More...

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