The Books: “Veronica” (Mary Gaitskill)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Veronica – – by Mary Gaitskill. Veronica is Gaitskill’s latest book, a novel. As is probably clear by now, Mary Gaitskill is one of my favorite writers today. I was kinda disappointed in Veronica – not the writing, never the writing … It was the cumulative effect of the story, the narration … It just didn’t add up for me. To me, her genius is in the short story form … although I’m open to persuasion! (Jon?? Ted?) Speaking of Ted, he wrote a great post about Veronica which he read recently. This post here describes my original response to Veronica when it was still fresh in my mind. To me, the novel works best when she gets really specific – the way New York feels and looks at 5 o’clock in the morning, the kinds of conversations you have when you’re drunk at a sex club in Paris, the way roommates act, the way moss on the tree gets drenched with rain … Gaitskill is so so good at that stuff. In Veronica that is all there – but I felt her straining for something else. Something universal. This mostly comes up in the present-day sections when Allison is ill and taking a walk and thinking back on her life. I found my mind wandering during these sections … Gaitskill is not, to my taste, a “universal” writer, but I have to think more about this. She is obviously versatile – it’s not like she just keeps writing about the same people over and over, her characters have the stamp of authenticity – they stay behind in your mind, their quirks, the way their eyes flash, what they say … But it seemed to me in Veronica that perhaps Gaitskill felt that that wasn’t ENOUGH and she needed to move her telescope back and try to ‘say’ something about ALL of humankind. Not that Gaitskill shouldn’t stretch and challenge herself as an artist.

One of my favorite quotes about her is from a review of her story collection Because They Wanted To, and I think it applies here:

In “The Wrong Thing”, the novella that concludes the collection, Ms. Gaitskill seems to be striving toward an uncertain goal, and (like her narrator, Susan) she isn’t entirely successful. She’s slightly out of her depth — which is exactly where she needs to be; it’s the only place she’s going to make the discoveries that will take her up to the next level and the levels beyond. Once an artist of her command relinquishes enough control to let her brilliance lead her where it wants to, anything is possible.

YES. Gaitskill, a writer of fearless truth, unblinking honesty, and almost chilling accuracy, needs to be “out of her depth” – yes yes yes. And I felt that in Veronica. Gaitskill is getting older. She is not the 23 year old phenom who wrote Bad Behavior and scared the crap out of everybody. She’s an established writer. So what next? Where should she go next? What is her next topic? In order to answer those questions through her art, Gaitskill needs to take risks. And taking risks means there is a possibility of failure. I don’t think Veronica is a failure. Far from it. It just didn’t really work for me. But I see it in the context of her career as a whole. Pushing herself. Digging in. Rutting around. Being relentless with herself. Never resting on her laurels. Investigating. Coming out of what we might expect of her – and doing something else.

But also, it’s never EVER the writing that suffers. There’s some writing in this book that is as good as it gets.

As always, I look forward to what Mary Gaitskill will do next. She is a reminder to me to be courageous, to be truthful, to not care what people will think (you think it’s a coincidence that I decided to try to write my Enter Sandman story at the same time as I have been doing Gaitskill excerpts? Think again!!) – to be bold, and open, and true. To work hard. To hone your vision so you can see INTO an experience rather than stay on the surface of it. Gaitskill is a great great teacher in that regard.

EXCERPT FROM Veronica – – by Mary Gaitskill.

I stopped looking for a permanent job. I went out whenever I could, under any circumstance. When Sheila’s cousin in Brooklyn had a birthday party, I took the train out, only to stand in a sparsely furnished room with strangers. When a temp at the office gave a reading combined with a dance performance, I showed up to watch determined girls in leotards creep and crouch across a ratty stage drenched in nightmare orange. A friend of Candy’s – a harmless girl I despised for being harmless – invited us to a bachelorette party and I went.

No matter how unfashionable the party, fashionable music was always playing. The fashion then was silly and sepulchral at once, with hopping, skipping beats playing off a funereal overlay. Somebody sang, “This kiss will never fade away,” his voice like an oily black machine operating a merry-go-round of music flying on grossly painted wings. “It’s about the bombing of Dresden,” said a drunk boy. “Excuse me,” I said, and walked away. Heat flared in the flying music, then died like an explosion seen from far away. People walked around smiling and talking while the music likened mass death to a kiss and gave silliness a proud twist to its head. This kiss will never fade away. Alain kissed me forever while I stood on the outskirts of parties, watching people who meant something to one another. A fat person with an outthrust jawbone took someone’s hand and squeezed it; there was a burst of goodwill. A woman with desperate bony calves, made stark by her big high heels, grinned at someone across the room, her grin a signal of deep things inside both of them that nobody else could see. Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and turned up my nost. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world described by music – a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissue and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty, and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart.

I didn’t say any of this. I didn’t even think it. But it was visible in the way I held my body, and in my bitter, despising eyes. Other people could see it in me as surely as I saw it in them. And so I was able to make friends. I went to nightclubs with an “actress” named Joy, who might’ve been a model if not for hips that would’ve been ungainly in a photograph, but which gave her living walk a pleasing, viscous reek. She worked as a hostess in a piano bar, where she got paid to drink and talk to lonely businessmen. She lived in a tiny shotgun apartment piled with dirty dishes, cat boxes, and open jars of clawed-at cold cream. Hurled pairs of pants tried to flee across the couch; wilted dresses snored on the kitchen chairs. The two cats tore the stuffing out of the couch and rolled toilet paper down the hall. During the day, Joy sat in this ragged nest like a princess, bathing in the kitchen with one gleaming pink foot perched on the edge of the tub, or sitting wrapped in a soiled comforter to drink coffee and eat cheesecake out of a tin. At night, she sailed out wearing absurd clothes as if they were Givenchy gowns. Once when I complimented her on one of her mismatched earrings, she pointed at the sky and said, “That earring means, Don’t look at my finger; look at the moon.”

Together, we were assured admittance to exclusive clubs where, lifted up and out of the hoi polloi and deposited at the entrance by the doorman’s fastidious gaze, we handed our coats to a gaunt creature in a coat-lined cave, then walked down the glowing sound-chamber hall, where music, lightly skipping in the main rooms, here bumbled from wall to wall like a ghost groaning in purgatory. We turned a corner and the music showed its laughing public face. We entered the great night flower of fun, open and dark like a giant lily swarming with drunken fairies. Into the swarm we flew, Joy darting, hovering, seeking and finding the inevitable man handing out cocaine to girls.

Our converation was so much torn paper on the surging current of our united forward intent. But at some point, she would lean with her hip against me, and her body would talk to me, light and charmingly, of earrings and the moon. And at some other point, I would emerge from the bathroom and she would be gone, leaving me to wander with drunken, burning eyes, seeking a way into heaven. Sometimes I would wake with a dry mouth in the dim apartment of a naked man who’d promised he was that way but whose snoring face now denied it.

If I called Joy, she would tell me of her adventures, of this one’s amazing kiss, or that one’s art-world status. Otherwise, I didn’t hear from her until she wanted to go out again; if I wasn’t able to go out that night, she quickly got off the phone.