VeronicaA Novel

A masterful, meditative novel about beauty, youth and regret.
In this masterful, meditative novel, Alison, a onetime model, ruminates on her faded youth and a lost friendship. Now in her 40s and suffering from a shoulder injury and hepatitis C, Alison is eking out a living as an office cleaner. Yet her memories drift back from the bleak present to her “bright past” as a teenager, eager to escape an unhappy childhood home for runways, clubs and cocaine-riddled affairs in Paris and New York. Intertwined with this glamorous setting, however, was another kind of cruelty and degradation, her posing and preening only a few steps removed from prostitution.

It was Veronica, Alison’s older, brasher, decidedly less-beautiful friend from an ad agency who clearly had a better grasp on beauty’s dangers: “Prettiness is always about pleasing someone,” she told Alison before Alison was ready to hear it. But Veronica died of AIDS decades ago and Alison, now older and ailing herself, revisits Veronica’s caustic wisdom with empathy and regret. Gaitskill is a writer of devastating clarity; even her most lyrically worded insights are embedded with sharp, unsentimental spikes of reality, and more often than not, it’s not a pretty picture.