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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I've read Bad Behavior, a collection of nine short stories by the author that threw me across the room. Some of her disassociated New Yorkers looking for connections in all sorts of places occupy rent controlled apartments in my head and have refused to leave. I had high hopes for this novel, published in 2005 and dealing with a female friendship in 1980s Manhattan, but threw in the towel at the 73% mark. The prose is jeweled and characters pop off the page but there's so much Hooptedoodle. Fatal Hooptedoodle.

Alison scrapes by in San Mateo, accepting charity from a friend to clean his office, living with hepatitis and suffering chronic pain in her arm from a car accident. Alison remembers many things from the days when she was healthy and beautiful. She remembers growing up in suburban New Jersey and needing to escape. She remembers running away to San Francisco and living on sofas. She remembers fucking a catalog agent who launches her modeling career. She remembers working as a runway model in Paris and living the high life as the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe. She remembers working as an office temp in Manhattan and meeting Veronica, who is twelve years older, brash and kooky and soon to die of AIDS.

Gaitskill is a gifted writer and fills the novel with stellar Writing.

When it was over, I went down the stairs like I was sliding down a chute and came out the other end of the rabbit hole. On the street, it was business as usual. There was no secret language of little complicated things. The fog had come in and the store windows had gone dull. It was cold and I was hungry. I found a diner, where I had a piece of blueberry pie with two creamers poured over it, then tea with sugar. Across from me, a meager girl with raw bare legs was crying against a big older woman in a rough coat. Flares kept going off in my body, rushes of strange, blank sensation, like bursts of electricity. Gregory Carlson had given me cab fare, but I kept it and took the bus. It soothed me to sit with so many people and to rock with the movement of the bus creaking up hill after hill. The flaring subsided and my body quieted; with listless wonder, I realized that the song had not really said "ossifier." It had said "hearts of fire," which I thought was not as good.

Have you ever spent the day at a museum and got to a point where your brain needed a rest as much as your feet? When you can't see one more fascinating exhibit or one more priceless work of art? When it becomes stimulus overload? That's what reading Veronica felt like. Writing overload. Around the 30% mark, I started to get worn out. There's no story. Gaitskill's narrative is one long thread of "and then, and then, and then." Her prized writing is what John Steinbeck called Hooptedoodle, overly wordy prose that gets in the way of the story and he wishes he didn't have to read. I didn't either and that's why I gave up on the book.

Gaitskill's characters left a mark on me. I could visualize Alison dragging herself along the side of the road, suffering from pain, asking to bum a cigarette and maybe if I had one to give her, she'd say, "I used to be healthy and beautiful once." I recognized in the narrator the type of person who's neither good or bad, who neither makes good decisions or bad decisions, who's blessed with both good luck and cursed with bad, but tends to wear people down and move on, struggling to live one day to the next. And any one or two paragraphs of the book are excellent.

More highlights:

My roommate came home and turned on the light, and--bang!--there was no mother and no demons. She clacked across the floor in her high heels, chatting and wiping her lipstick off. It was 4:00 in the morning, but when she saw how unhappy I was, she took out her tarot cards and told my fortune until it came out the way I wanted it. (Luxury. A feast. A kind, loyal woman. Transformation. Home of the true heart.) The sun rose; the enamel rooftops turned hot violet. I had just lain down on the couch to sleep when Alain called and told me I was going to be moving into an apartment on rue du Temple. The rent would be taken care of. Everything would be taken care of.

We met for champagne and omelettes in a sunny bistro with bright-colored cars honking outside. He talked about the Rolling Stones and his six-year-old daughter, after whom he had named the agency Céleste. He asked if I wanted children. I said, "No." He grabbed my nose between two knuckles and squeezed it. The omelettes came heaped on white plates with blanched asparagus. He hadn't kissed me yet. He spread his slim legs and tucked a cloth napkin into his shirt with an air of appetite. I wanted badly to touch him. Inside its daintiness, the asparagus was acrid and deep. He said, "The first thing we need to do is get you a Swiss bank account. All the smart girls have one. First, you don't have to pay taxes that way. Then they invest it for you. Your money will double, triple. You should see!" I loved him and he obviously loved me. Love like in the James Bond movies, where the beautiful sexy girl loves James but tries to kill him anyway. We would love each other for a while and then part. Years later, I would ride down the street in a fancy car. I'd see Alain and he'd see me. I'd smile on my way past. Sexy spy music rubbed my ear like a tongue; it rubbed my crotch, too. We finished quickly and went to my new apartment.

Another way to describe this novel is that it is like a runway show or a dog show. Or a drag race (with cars, not transvestites). Some people can spend hours looking at fashion models or dogs or cars (or drag queens) going in circles. If you love Writing, this novel may be for you. I could see myself reading an essay about Gaitskill's themes and prose and loving that essay, but like Hooptedoodle, I just don't want to have to read it.

Mary Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1954. She's taught creative writing at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown University and Syracuse University. As of 2020, Gaitskill is a visiting professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.



In the event you missed it: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

Come Closer by Sara Gran