...a heady, hallucinatory narrative—another walk on the wild side from a writer who has never shied from tackling potentially contentious topics ... The narrative spans only a single day, but it covers a great deal of ground, moving in and out of the present as the 46-year-old Allison looks back on her life ... Gaitskill’s lively portrayal of the carefree ’70s and affluent ’80s, her superlative powers of description and delicate handling of sensitive topic matter have resulted in a profound narrative about beauty and mortality, loss and redemption.
...something of a departure from her usual taut style. A rumination on the relationship between beauty and cruelty, it moves around disorientingly in time, as if to mimic the emotional distress of its narrator, Alison ... Much of Veronica dissects, in an almost Proustian manner, the obsessive pursuit of a way of feeling ... Gaitskill is enormously gifted at depicting youthful impatience and the dangerous, febrile sensuality that accompanies it, and throughout the book are passages of plainly spectacular beauty ... Though it is full of meditative wisdom, Veronica begins slowly and laboriously, taking a while to find its footing. Its structure is ungainly. Some of the flights of prose seem overwrought ... Her prose has a perfumed clarity. She tacks against the upright dichotomies of our historical moment -- dichotomies that shape how we think and who we are but are often more contingent than we know.
...Gaitskill is an author of interiors. When you visualize her characters, you invariably imagine them locked within the confines of four walls. Often they find themselves revealed -- if not to each other, then at least to themselves -- in cramped apartments or seedy motels, in desensitized workspaces or within the claustrophobic confines of automobiles ... For all the myriad pleasures the novel holds -- and there are many, from the obvious beauty of language (in its lyricism, it occasionally recalls the work of Denis Johnson), to its brave experiments with structure and form -- the weakest aspect of the book is, surprisingly, the unlikely friendship around which it is built ... An intensely lyrical and poetic work, full of rich turns of phrase and brilliant, vivid metaphor.
Veronica, Gaitskill's first novel in a decade and a half, returns to Two Girls territory by focusing on an unlikely friendship between two apparently contrasting women, but it has nothing of its predecessor's tautness and control, its ability to spin a strange but compelling tale. It also seems trapped in the decade which it describes, both intentionally and unconsciously ... Issues of loyalty, loneliness and a sense of the simultaneous beauty and cruelty of contemporary life forge some sort of framework for an impressionistic novel that frequently reads as though it's been cut and pasted too many times ... However, this is a humane novel: a study of brutal loneliness with moments of tenderness. It is also a book that loses the plot. Veronica is stuck in an era. While representing the nihilism of the glittering period it portrays, it echoes that emptiness itself.
Gaitskill richly brings to life the downtown art scene of the decade, its beauty and glamour but also its grime. One of her most enticing skills as a writer is the way that she always sees the whole picture. Here, within a broader canvas of almost viscerally aching melancholy, bursts of bright animation sit alongside depictions of some the most unsavoury elements of human interaction – namely, duty, pity and rejection ... Central to Veronica is the universal human struggle to forge meaningful connections with others.
...one of the great American novels of the past decade ... Veronica has a surfeit of experience and feeling, and, if she seems pathetic in the way that she grasps for connection with the person least likely to offer it, that hint of sentimentality is offset by the fierce majesty of her refusal to suppress it—though it takes a certain keenness of perception to see it that way.
Veronica flits nimbly through several different periods in her life, darting around in an almost free-associative tumble, which takes some getting used to ... Writing in brisk, clipped sentences that snap like a whip, Gaitskill establishes a point-of-view that's distinctly unsentimental, bordering on cruel ... Veronica reads like the kind of novel only an austere, awards-giving body could love, with a prose-poetic style that's as undeniably sophisticated as it is hard to crack. With such a half-formed, superficial woman as narrator, there's no clear path into the multi-tiered story, yet Gaitskill supplies plenty of extraordinary passages, including a particularly vivid description of the onset of the AIDS pandemic in the '80s New York.
...Veronica offers just enough details about the photo studio, the modeling agency, and the office as are required for a spare version of verisimilitude; precisely as much, and no more, reality as seems necessary before the book can dispense with the formalities and get on with its concerns ... What’s most unusual about Veronica is how much: The experience of reading it seems rather like biting into a nightmare-inducing, virally loaded madeleine ... It creates an atmosphere, provokes a response, and suffuses us with an emotion that we can easily, all too easily, summon up. It’s art that you can continue to see even with your eyes closed.
...at the very moment where Two Girls and so many of Gaitskill’s stories have pulled up short, at the edge of human connection, Veronica makes that connection and plunges straight down, shining the bright light of Alison’s sympathy into the murk of her attachment, probing its insufficiencies ... It is one thing to say a writer has made no mistakes—Gaitskill writes as if she hasn’t made any choices. She has, of course. She has been at work on Veronica for more than a decade. It is the best thing she has yet written. At a moment when many of our best novels seem to have been written in a borrowed or restored language, Veronica has the sound of original speech.
Although the arc of the story takes place on a single rainy afternoon, through Alison's thoughts it travels between the East and West coasts and to Paris; the time moves from the 1970s to the present. Gaitskill accomplishes these shifts in concise, telling paragraphs that a less talented writer could not have managed ... Redemption is a concept foreign to Gaitskill's books, yet she decides it's been earned in this one. Maybe not. Still, the allure of Veronica lies not in its hopeful possibilities but in its suffering.
Beauty and shit-beauty and ugliness-are not mutually exclusive in Mary Gaitskill's new novel, a deep-tissue-damaging chronicle of a strange friendship between a beautiful model and an unbeautiful copy editor that claws open our pretty, shiny exteriors to reveal the ugly, fetid 'hide with bristles' lurking just beneath ... Gaitskill is a bitingly creative stylist, and similes and metaphors squirm like ticks under the grim exterior of her material ... But elegant edginess doesn't elbow out soulful themes of beauty and ugliness, sex and rage, guilt and redemption, and, most potently, detachment, loneliness, and the fear of terrible things 'that can't be said.'
Gaitskill...returns with this ravishing novel about a friendship between a young fashion model and an unattractive older woman dying of AIDS ... Veronica and Alison were not lovers, hardly even friends, but they haunted each other, and somehow, as Gaitskill devastatingly illustrates, they made each other whole ... A gorgeous, articulate novel that is at once an unflinching meditation on degradation and a paean to deliverance.
Gaitskill's style is gorgeously caustic and penetrating with a homing instinct toward the harrowing; her ability to capture abstract feelings and sensations with a precise and unexpected metaphor is a squirmy delight to encounter in such abundance ... It is hard to convey the tragedy of a girl in the prime of her beauty who savors the ugly way she experiences herself; it is more wrenching, and more in keeping with the gimlet-eyed clarity of the book's earlier pages, to convey the tragedy of the truly ugly woman, who once, despite her demurrals and insecurities, knew beauty.
