Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

"Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw."

Veronica is an almost claustrophobic character study in which the plot elements are only relevant in their repercussions with regard to the central characters' inner subjectivities and anxieties.

Veronica is the study of the tensions and depth of relationships based on inequality - the motivations for some friendships and relationships can be simultaneously condescending and benevolent. People need each other in different ways and power dynamics can shift and refocus depending on changing circumstances. Gaitskill exposes the illusion of equality that we all cling to in our personal lives. She introduces us to the friendship between Allison, an aging former model and Veronica, a prim and often caustic older woman. Their unlikely partnership is continually pointed out by Allison herself, her own motivations suspect even to herself. Their friendship evolves against the backdrop of the emergent AIDS epidemic, Veronica herself is HIV positive. Gaitskill is famous for her willingness and ability to engage with issues of intimacy. Sexuality for Gaitskill has the potential to magnify isolation. What is unique within the context of this novel is the relationship between sexual intimacy and death or sickness. Each of the characters in the novel are struggling to connect, consistently confronting the impossibility to break through another's subjectivity. Allison uses her father as a frame of reference, his obsession with music and his inability to share his love of it with even his closest friends, creates a kind of resigned melancholy in him. Gaitskill actually frames the discussions of Allison's father within the rhetoric of language - translation - textual gaps - slippery meaning. Allison herself inherits the desire to communicate through the "language of music" and in the book's more heartbreaking moments that desire is juxtaposed with her sharply isolating sexual experiences.

The novel takes place over a single day, all expressed as Allison's interior monologue, predominantly reflecting on the past. In a way, Veronica recalled Mrs. Dalloway for me (near and dear to my heart and not to be referenced lightly), the exploration of interiorities in a stream of consciousness style through the individual while exploding the text outwards into the overarching anxieties of the time period. Allison recalls her exodus from her home in New Jersey, her entry into the world of modeling and the pitfalls and exploitation that occurs within it and her settlement in New York and the formation of her friendship with Veronica. What is strange about this novel was how engaged I remained even while thinking that most of the plot development and exposition with respect to Allison's younger life was incredibly boring and bordering on cliche. The intensity with which Allison recalls her friendship with Veronica - despite the fairly minimal descriptions the reader receives about their interactions, their connection is steeped within a physicality which extends to a kind of emotional depth that leaves Allison at times exasperated, embarrassed, aloof or heartbroken. Both of the women's bodies are sites of trauma - literally through their respective encounters with disease but also in a much more basic way. Their bodies are marked by their lived experience and reflect the ways in which the world treats them - their sense of self is so intimately tied to their body's reception in the world.

Veronica exists within a complex set of relationships between self awareness and delusion. While Allison attempts to dissect her "strange" friendship, she traces the process by which she arrives at the present, the redundant mistakes and the inability to form connection. What we see is a psychological portrait laid bare, allowing access to both the stated and unstated aspects of that formation. Allison returns again and again to her way of explaining situations about which she feels ambivalent - the central image of which is essentially - in nine out of ten visions of this moment x would be true and in one y would be true. She consistently allows for and even relies upon the coexistence of competing or multiple truths subject to perception.