Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

The music turned the corner of a darkly baubled wall.  I imagined Veronica alone in the dark, waiting for the brute that stalked her to show itself in full.  I imagined her horror at the small eruptions of death on her body--the sores, infections, rashes, yeast, and liquid shit.  I imagined her holed up in the part of herself where all was still orderly and clean, insistently maintaining the propriety and congruence that had enabled her to get through the senselessly disordered world, and that was slowly being taken from her.

Even more than the others, I wanted to tell her this.  I wanted her to know that even though she was dying, she was still included in the story told by the music.  That she wasn't completely and brutally alone.  The music raised its lamp and illuminated its own dark interior.  I will tell her, I thought.  I will remember and I will tell her.

Alison is not old, but not young, and she is sick: defaced by hepatitis, and carrying around an old injury that makes it difficult to clean windows.  Once she was a model, drawn to a world that both rewarded and punished her for her beauty.  In her accounting, she is alternately cherished and abused by photographers and editors, who speak about her as if she's not in the room.  At times she seems like an it girl, more beautiful than anyone in the room, but in other times the jobs are thin and the world rejects her.

During one of these famine times she meets Veronica, another temp working nights as a proofreader.  Veronica is older and ugly, but she has a charisma and glamor all her own: a stubborn unwillingness to bend to popular opinion, a love for shabbiness, a bisexual boyfriend who comes and goes.  Something about her embodies the New York of the 80's even more than the world of modeling and nightclubs that is a beacon for Alison; in another book that might make her a cliche but here she has a kind of vitality that makes us understand what Alison sees in her.  Veronica's glamor, unlike Alison's, is not mediated by men, her ugliness sets her free.  They form an unlikely friendship that is both cemented and challenged when Veronica begins to succumb to AIDS.

The connection between the present and the past in Veronica is highly silly.  We watch Alison trudge through rain, wash windows, play with the children of friends, and ultimately, climb a mountain somewhere in the East Bay to look over the San Francisco skyline.  It's one of those books where a memory lurks around every bend, waiting to pounce: "I look outside and see a little budding tree, its slim black body shining with rain.  Joyous and intelligent, like a fresh girl, the earth all new to its slender, seeking roots.  I think of Trisha, erect and seeking with sparkling eyes."  Do you hear that, Trisha?  You're the tree.  As Alison climbs the mountain, there are more trees, more nature, breathing its transcendental health, and like Alison we climb for no other reason than we know there's a vista, an epiphany, at the top.

But the writing in Veronica is so good that you might never notice how weirdly constructed it is, or how the narrative stalls for pages and pages until the title character comes into full view.  It's luminous in the way that a lot of prose never is, despite the claims of book reviews, full of light and sharp-edged shadows.  Among other things, Gaitskill really knows how to talk about popular music, which I have always found few people do well.  Here's Gaitskill's description of Karen Carpenter:

...the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close.  When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked.  But starvation was in her voice all along.  That was the poignancy of it.  A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.

What makes it work so well is that Gaitskill refused to tell us exactly who she's talking about.  If we don't know, then maybe the book isn't for us; but if we do we get to see Karen in a new light.  The book, which goes out looking for the spirit of the Bad Old Days in New York City, might have easily fallen into a mash of cultural signifiers; as it is, it's like hearing Karen Carpenter for the first time.  And Gaitskill can do it just as easily for Michael Jackson as for Rigoletto.

Music becomes a symbol of passion without words: the love and connection that Alison feels for Veronica, but can never quite articulate.  It's music in its Dionysian mode, per Nietzsche (sorry), the pure emotion that connects souls.  It's the ineffable grief, too, of the AIDS epidemic, and the only way to fully articulate the size of its loss.


What is Veronica, to Alison?  A harrowing vision of her future self?  That's how the book seems to set it up, at first: the bright young model should have looked better, and seen.  But love will not be reduced to self-regard; Veronica's value is not in the way she reflects Alison but the friendship they build, as weird as it is, outside of the boundaries of social order and good taste.  Probably, the only real friendships are the ones that are weird.  I am not sure that the novel earns its vista, its epiphany at the top of the mountain.  But the climb is worth it: it evoked strong sympathies in me, despite a setting and plot that I expected to feel worn-out.