Recommend: Yes<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reduced to its core, Veronica <\/em>shares the same plot as Turtle Diary<\/em>, sans the shelled beasts. Both novels are about an unexpected friendship that cumulates in both parties discovering a renewed enthusiasm for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite this extremely strong linkage, the style of the two are completely different. Turtle Diary<\/em> reflected a muddled British intellectual class, quoting classical texts often and in long sentences that could feel endless. Veronica <\/em>was published three decades later and is born of the MTV era. It has quick time shifts, recurrent phrasing to hit the emotional currents carved by hindsight and many short quick sentences that aim to gratify instantly rather than tease the mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The narrator isn’t Veronica, rather a girl named Alison. Alison grows up in a bit of a no where town in America in the 80s. Unsatisfied, she runs away from home and pursues, with varying degrees of success and (correlated) defiling, a modelling career. Gaitskill’s twist on the American runaway waif is more materialistic and transactional than her contemporaries (such as Tessa Hadley). Alison is determined to Be Someone. Her peers that sink below this standard are looked down upon in disdain. Alison is judicious, cold and alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Or at least that’s the first story being told. Interspersed throughout are recollections of a woman, Veronica. The two meet and form a connection when they are both on the night shift at a dead-end office job. Veronica is sixteen years Alison’s senior. There’s the sense that Veronica is the first adult that Alison respects, although she rarely likes her. It’s not a plot spoiler to reveal Veronica dies of aids a few years after she first meets Alison and it’s only many years after Veronica’s death does Alison come to appreciate her impact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the reason why the book cuts between two time periods. Alison’s present (she is now in her fifties) is completely benign. She cleans an office. She visits a friend. She waits for a bus. She walks through a forest. The meat of the story is the flashbacks to Veronica. But the feelings of gratitude and friendship rarely break through in these flashbacks. The writing is self centred, aggressively erotic and brutally honest. It’s only now in her fifties, freed from being young and beautiful, can Alison open her heart to the long dead Veronica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is the suggestion here from Gaitskill that beauty is worth aspiring to – it is intoxicating and powerful – but also that its tragic disappearance opens space for new, softer wisdoms to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gaitskill’s writing is impressive. She is both harsh and lyrical, never letting the latter subdue the former. She reaches to convey a beauty that is only such because of the ruin written inevitably into its future. Alison as an older woman is ruined and alone. No matter the glamour of the main story from the 80s being told, it’s always through the lens of failure. Alison’s lust and ambition and drive was left to dry out in the sun just as quickly as the contentment and calm in those she despised as a younger woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Veronica<\/em> is such a female novel. It is hard for me to imagine a man that would enjoy it. I doubt a model’s inner disgust and later her physical degradation is of interest to a masculine reader. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “How did you get into modelling to begin with?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “By fucking a nobody catalog agent who grabbed my crotch.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn’t have to be embarrassed or make up something nice, because Veronica was a nobody. My disdain was so habitual, I didn’t notice it. But she did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Every pretty girl has a story like that, hon,” Veronica said. “I had that prettiness, too. I have those stories.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n She drew on her cigarette, blew out. “Of course, you’re a lot prettier than I was – you’d have won the contest hands down!” She laughed. “But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don’t have to do that anymore. I<\/em> don’t have to do that anymore. It’s my show now.” She said these words as if she were a movie star walking past me while I gaped. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “I wasn’t trying to please anyone,” I said uncertainly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “No?” She stubbed out her cigarette in a bright yellow ashtray. “What were you trying to do?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them, she’s the fool and I’m the person who has something. But in the tenth, I’m the fool and it’s her show now. For just a second, that’s the picture I saw.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n There is no grace in Alison. She is mean and thin, desperate to find the Room of Important People and squeeze herself through the crack. Nor is there grace in Veronica, a capricious woman forcing others to make space for her. The small accommodations that each make for the other are the only reserves of grace that the two can pull from, and these endure even when life does not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They’re taking it all away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books","category-recommended_cait"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1768,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions\/1768"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n