Awards
2006
Morning News Tournament of Books Nominee
Nominee 2005 National Book Awards
Nominee National Book Critics Circle Awards
Synopses & Reviews
The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of
Bad Behavior and
Two Girls, Fat and Thin,
Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years." Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica's terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.
Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul's hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, Veronica is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love's abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.
Review
"Beautiful, grotesque, graceful, and exceedingly well-executed. People write their whole lives in the hope of coming up with just one sentence that rises to the level of this book....It's a remarkable achievement." The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
Review
"In Veronica, as ever, Gaitskill's brand of brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace, is unlike anyone else's. And it constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around." Meghan O'Rourke, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Gaitskill taps into a deeper vein of emotional force, and with vivid language and an absorbing architecture, she delivers her most affecting, sophisticated work to date." Boston Globe
Review
"Beauty and ugliness do battle in Veronica, not only within the minds of its tormented characters but also on the page. Ms. Gaitskill writes so radiantly about violent self-loathing that the very incongruousness of her language has shocking power." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"Don't read this book for its disjointed plot, but for Mary Gaitskill's sensuous yet precise language and her tough portrait of a bygone age. (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"[R]avishing....A gorgeous, articulate novel that is at once an unflinching meditation on degradation and a paean to deliverance." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[A] raw-nerves novel that is at once elegiac, funny, and life affirming." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Gaitskill's implacable refusal of sentimentality is her great strength no group hugs here, just baleful understanding." The Washington Post
Review
"While the book occasionally gives off emotional sparks and affixes apt impressions to well-drawn scenes, its rehashed plot and herky-jerky structure are millstones around the reader's neck." Miami Herald
Synopsis
Finalist for the National Book Award
Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
Synopsis
A finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, here is an evocative novel about female friendship in the glittering 1980s.
Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
Synopsis
Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
About the Author
Mary Gaitskill is most recently the author of
Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998. Her stories and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and T
he O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. She lives in New York.
Bad Behavior is available in paperback from Vintage Books.
Reading Group Guide
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year
“Gaitskill is enormously gifted. . . . Throughout the book are passages of plainly spectacular beauty. . . . [Veronica] constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around.” —The New York Times Book Review
The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your groups discussion of Mary Gaitskills Veronica, which The New York Times Book Review hailed as “a masterly examination of the relationship between surface and self, culture and fashion, time and memory.”
1. What is the significance of the story Alisons mother told her about the wicked little girl when she was a child? In what ways does it function as a kind of parable, or prediction, of Alisons life?
2. Alisons narrative shifts between past and present, or rather between several layers of the past and the present. What effects does Mary Gaitskill create through this method of narration? In what ways does it mirror the way the mind and memory actually work?
3. What kind of relationship does Alison have with her parents and with her sisters? How do they view her modeling career?
4. Gaitskill often personifies music in Veronica: “music, lightly skipping in the main rooms, here bumbled from wall to wall like a ghost groaning in purgatory” [p. 133]; “Music fell out of windows, splattered on the ground, got up, and walked away” [p. 141]. Why does Gaitskill emphasize music throughout the novel? Why is music so important to Alison?
5. Alison dreams of being a poet. In what ways is her narrative—in terms of its language and emotional intensity—suffused with poetry?
6. Veronica tells Alison: “prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you dont have to do that anymore. I dont have to do that anymore. Its my show now” [p. 44]. How does Alisons beauty enslave her? In what ways is Veronica more free because she lacks such beauty?
7. How does Alisons experience as a model affect her—morally, emotionally, financially?
8. What does Alison mean when she says that she became a demon and “was saved by another demon, who looked on me with pity and so became human again. And because I pitied her in return, I was allowed to become human, too” [p. 256]? Why would such a mutual pity enable Alison and Veronica to regain their humanity? What is the source of this pity?
9. What does the novel suggest about the harsher reality beneath the surface glamour of the fashion industry? How do people treat each other in this world?
10. How does Alison fall from modeling in Paris to cleaning the photographers office in San Rafael? Is one job more demeaning than the other?
11. Why is Veronica so important to Alison? How and why does Alisons relationship to Veronica change over the course of the novel?
12. What does the novel reveal about the early days of AIDS? How do people react to Veronica when they learn she has AIDS?
13. Veronica is an exceptionally painful novel, filled with sickness, cruelty, suffering, and death, and yet it ends with Alison saying, “I will call my father and tell him I finally heard him. I will be full of gratitude and joy” [p. 257]. What has she finally heard? What is she grateful for? Why does she anticipate such joy?