Book
Veronica
Record details
- ISBN: 0375421459 (hbk.)
- ISBN: 9780375421457 (hbk.)
-
Physical Description:
227 p. ; 22 cm.
print - Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : Pantheon Books, c2005.
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| Genre: | Psychological fiction. |
Available copies
- 3 of 3 copies available at Sitka.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 0 total copies.
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Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alert Bay Public Library | AF GAI (Text) | 35125000123871 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Salt Spring Island Public Library | FIC GAI (Text) | 057027 | Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Terrace Public Library | Gai (Text) | 001898238 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2005 September #1
/*Starred Review*/ Gaitskill writes sexually frank and emotionally scouring tales of women on the verge and in the abyss, including her first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991). Here, she again posits an improbable alliance between two women who, for all their differences, share a renegade spirit. Alison, the intriguingly ambivalent narrator, discovers at an early age that her prettiness gives her power and leaves her vulnerable. She stumbles into modeling, barely survives a decadent interlude in Paris, then ends up in New York, worried that her modeling days are over. She takes a night-shift temp job and meets Veronica, who is older, unbeautiful, not hip, and joltingly cynical. Duncan, the love of Veronica's life, is a rampantly unfaithful bisexual who infects her with AIDS. Gaitskill perfectly evokes the ambience of the 1970s and 1980s: the trance of pop music, the ubiquitous drugs, fashion's sadomasochistic bent, the lust for wealth, and the quiet terror of AIDS. And, harmonizing with Jennifer Egan, Julie Hecht, and Amy Bloom, she zeros in on the vagaries of the mind as she considers beauty and disease, betrayal and loyalty, and fear and compassion in a raw-nerves novel that is at once elegiac, funny, and life affirming. ((Reviewed September 1, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2005 August #1
Gaitskill, whose story "Secretary" was made into a 2002 film of the same name, returns with this ravishing novel about a friendship between a young fashion model and an unattractive older woman dying of AIDS.Alison Owen is a 36-year-old former runway model now enduring the consequences of her teenage debut in the fashion industry. She occasionally works as a cleaning woman, but mostly lives on disability-the result of an auto accident that brought the last phase of her diminishing career to an end. Insomnia, the codeine she takes to relieve the chronic pain of her ruined rotator cuff and recurrent fevers (symptoms of advancing hepatitis-C) combine to transform her waking consciousness into a lush kaleidoscope of memory: international fashion shoots; her Parisian chauffeur-lover, René; the paranoid agency head, Alain, who took her as his mistress and then absconded with her Swiss bank account; her mother's deathbed; her father's anguish while listening to Rigoletto; the catalogue agent who raped her at 17; Jersey boys from her hometown; a naked man on a leash in an S&M club; her Jay McInerney-like boyfriend in New York's booming '80s social scene. But most of all, she remembers Veronica, the abrasive older woman she met against the backdrop of a Manhattan that was just learning about AIDS (and still believing women were immune). Veronica, who reacts dispassionately to Alison's confessions of her past, is an unerring proofreader (her motto: "Still Anal After All These Years")-one of the army of over-educated clerical workers who mine the night shifts of law firms and big business to fund their screw-the-system lives. Her friends are all literate gay men; her bisexual lover is Duncan, who eventually succumbs to 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. Copyright Kirkus 2005 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2005 June #2
Back after ten years, the author of Bad Behavior details the friendship between down-on-her-luck model Alison and an older woman named Veronica who's about to discover AIDS (it's 1980s New York/Paris). With a five-city tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2005 October #2
In her first novel in ten years, Gaitskill (Bad Behavior ; Two Girls, Fat and Thin ) offers an ode to the complex feelings that manifest in women's friendships. When Alison, a fashion model recovering from a stint on the Paris runway, meets Veronica, she is immediately drawn to the older woman's quirky irreverence. As the two become closer, Alison is pulled into Veronica's colorful, if often dysfunctional, world. Although Gaitskill's protagonists are perfectly hewn, a host of ancillary characters adds heft to the story. What's more, the excesses of the 1980s--including sex and drugs--give a rich patina to the world of the hip and their imitators. Sadly, the nonstop party ends when Veronica contracts AIDS. Much of the narrative takes place on a single day in which a now middle-aged Alison reflects on her life via an onslaught of flashbacks. While this time frame stretches credibility, the novel is so well wrought that it barely matters. Beautifully and sensitively crafted, Gaitskill's return is highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/05.]--Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
[Page 45]. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2005 August #1
Imagine that Edie Sedgwick penned a roman a clef in her 50s, and that she discovered, in her ugly, diseased decrepitude, that celebrities and downtown loft spaces and skuzzy rich hangers-on were the nadir of existence. Imagine that she managed, in her own post-trauma-addled way, to convey a beautiful-ugly portrait of this life, and the life that followed that life, a life of cleaning offices and riding public buses, in a wincingly acute manner that allowed you not only to forgive the destructiveness in which her youthful self luxuriated but view it as a real human tragedy. This is the accomplishment of Veronica, or rather of Alison, who is the narrator and soul-wearied subject of Mary Gaitskill's second novel. Alison, who lived an Edie-ish life, has a face that is "broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks." Now in her 50s, she cleans her friend's toilet for money, she's sick with hepatitis and her "focus sometimes slips and goes funny"-an apt description of her story's pleasing disorientation, a story which amounts to a nonchronological recounting of her "bright and scalding" past as she hikes feverishly up a hill. Alison's narration begins as a bracing account of her "gray present" from which she recalls her childhood and her years as a model in Paris and New York and the death of her friend Veronica from AIDS. A former inhabitant of a face-deep world, she cannot describe a person without first reducing his or her face to a single violent visual stroke ("his face was like lava turned into cold rock"). These descriptions-or dismissals-fail, on purpose, to render any character a visual flesh-and-blood presence; instead, Alison's way of seeing renders people distressingly naked. Of course no seasoned reader of Mary Gaitskill would expect a preeningly tragic book about the emotional pitfalls of modeling, and so where there might be an airbrushed homage to failing beauty or weepy nostalgia over formerly elastic body parts there are instead turds, sphincters, scars, wounds and other celebrated repugnancies. 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. As the book progresses, Alison's gray present becomes subsumed by the scalding brightness of her past, until her sick and ugly self is all but obliterated from the pages; aside from the occasional reminder that Alison is climbing a hill, her sage hindsight collapses into the immediacy of her recollections, and Alison's shallow bohemian fixations again become her only story. The result is that her blunt honesty feels face, rather than soul, deep. 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. (On sale Oct. 11) Heidi Julavits is the author of two novels, The Mineral Palace and The Effect of Living Backwards. She is a founding editor of the Believer. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
