#52 - Veronica

Mary Gaitskill's Veronica (yes, yes, I KNOW, not on my Summer Reading list, let's just give up the ghost now on that, ahem, agenda) came highly recommended by Crabby Kate, who enjoyed it a great deal. I read this book on Friday, after a particularly gruelling few days of writing myself, where I added about fifty-odd pages to my latest story. The point? That my mind wandered a lot during the tale, which probably has more to do with my own state of mind than in Gaitskill's storytelling.

Veronica follows the life of Alison, a once young and beautiful model whose life and career is left in ruins after an accident. During the almost-height of her success, she befriends an office worker/"fag hag" whose tempestuous relationship has left her with AIDS and a broken heart. The novel tracks the peaks and valleys of their odd friendship as it develops Alison's story, from high school dropout to Parisian runway model, from New York fashion model to West Coast victim, as she comes to terms with her own illness, hepatitis C. The novel has no conventional storyline, no true narrative held together by the constraints of time, but it seems to work as a series of memories that serve to take the reader from one page to the next.

The discombobulated state of the narrative obviously echoes Alison's own fragile psyche, and being a girl with a disease herself, I identified with the "sick" part of the book: Veronica's slowly decaying body, Alison's tattered wreck of an arm from a car crash, both of their diseases a result of choices they made, but not necessarily on their own—more a sign of how desperately unhappy they both were, that unhappiness somewhat tying them together in the end.

It's a terribly melancholy novel, but I didn't really mind that considering I watched Before Sunset and Shakespeare in Love to balance out the feeling of wanting to dive off the dock and never surface in the evening after I finished the book ("Oh, baby, you're going to miss that plane!", LOVE IT), all in all I think it truly deserves the kudos its received (National Book Award nomination, etc.). Not as fascinated by the life of an ex-model, or by modelling in general, that whole "Gia-on-paper" bit is a tad overplayed, the book is a consistent example of creative writing at its novelistic best.