Mary Gaitskill’s novel, Veronica, is a meditation on truth and beauty told by its self-proclaimed peripheral protagonist, Alison. The novel loosely tracks her life as she is sucked into into the sleazy world of modelling, through drug-filled highs and lows, pooling around her relationships with her friend Veronica, and her own family, to which she continually returns.
I initially struggled with the book, because Alison’s raw and damaged voice, reminded me of Miranda July’s, whose novel “All fours” and short story collection “nobody belongs here more than you” I read in 2025. I was struck then by this original, raw, honest female voice and failed to be similarly struck the second time. Like July, Gaitskill/Alison is an off-beat woman, driven in her pursuit of beauty/truth, transgressing social norms, and watching herself do it.
Both are physically beautiful and desired by others, but restless and obsessive in prodding and pushing at uglier, more vital and ultimately more beautiful aspects of themselves and others. Both write poetically, capturing their heightened and fragmented sense of life, the world, themselves and others’ selves which are absurd, ugly, beautiful and terrifying through their eyes.
A kind of bystander in her own life, Alison is drawn into modelling, by a man who grabs her crotch, and this sets the tone of a modelling (under)world of sleazy male agents and photographers, buoyed along with money and drugs. She doesn’t learn to drive and is injured in a car accident from which she never heals, lacking the insurance cover to pay for treatment.
I was similarly outside this book for most of the way. I preferred July’s, maybe because I read her first and this other voice resonated so strongly with hers (Gaitskill wrote this book in the early nineties, and so the reverse may be truer). July’s book is also a more immersive read, a singular chronological narrative, whereas reading Veronica is like revisiting a series of circular pools.
There is a narrative here, as Alison leaves home and into modelling, moving between Paris, New York and San Francisco, but it is continually broken by the mediations of an older, ill and injured Alison as she slogs her way through the forest, or to clean the office of a man who once desired her, and now patronises and berates her. Similarly, she keeps returning to her family, and uses her father’s attempts to communicate his emotions through music, and her mother’s cautionary tale of the selfish daughter who sinks into hell, as frames to consider herself.
The book is named for Veronica, who she meets during one of her dips, when she is temping in New York. Veronica is considerably older, and somewhat absurd: a “fag hag” in a relationship with a regularly unfaithful bisexual man, who eventually gives her HIV. Like several other phenomena, Alison understands that Veronica is magnificent in about one 1 out of 10 shots, and depending on who is looking.
For her other-worldly sister, this is how Veronica is. Maybe most others never see the magnificent angle. Veronica is all artifice – her manner of speaking, her clothes, her hair, her apartment indicate a need to control and curate herself, made redundant by the incontrovertible truth of AIDS.
Alison also has a duplicitous, or polycipitous, relationship with Veronica, who she alternately hates and loves. She sees herself with Veronica as others see her – sometimes congratulating herself for her bravery, sometimes cringing. The book seems to centre on the interplay between the styled and the real.
Alison is hooked into modelling by wanting to be part of the music, the style of her generation, as captured in fleetingly brilliant fashion photographs, which are real and not real. Veronica is both entirely self-styled and inescapably real: in her deadly disease and to Alison. Alison seems to be continually trying to see Veronica, talking to friends and family about her, and thinking about her, even when they are together.
Alison describes herself as on the margins of the story, compared to her sister Daphne who puts herself through college, finds work, marries and has kids. Perhaps Alison lacks the narratives that would help her understand herself and is caught between fatalistic music and damning fairy tales. Like the work of Miranda July, this kind of ruminative, raw, blundering and honest tale opens up new narratives for women in important ways.