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
"Gaitskill's implacable refusal of sentimentality is her great strength no group hugs here, just baleful understanding." The Washington Post
Review
"[A] raw-nerves novel that is at once elegiac, funny, and life affirming." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"[R]avishing....A gorgeous, articulate novel that is at once an unflinching meditation on degradation and a paean to deliverance." Kirkus Reviews
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
"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
"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
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
"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)
Synopsis
The long-awaited novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior is a dark fairy tale set in Paris and Manhattan in the 1980s a story about beauty, narcissism and appetite, transience, aging and mortality.
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, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The 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.