Through the Gloss Darkly
CASE, KRISTEN
Through the Gloss Darkly Veronica By Mary Gaitskill Pantheon. 227 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Kristen Case Editor, "Twelfth Street Review" The photograph on the back of Bad Behavior, Mary...
...In part because it shifts so fluidly between present and past, and in part because of the surreal quality of the world Alison travels in, her narrative feels less like a story than a series of contingencies, arbitrary encounters and half-formed connections, with none of them substantial enough to bear the emotional weight they haul in tow...
...In her most recent author photo, Gaitskill's features are sharper: Her blond hair is swept up severely...
...They move between the present—pushing 50, sick and injured, she lives off disability checks and occasional cleaning work in Marin, California—and remembrances evoked by photographs from her past—by turns glamorous and brutal—in New Jersey, San Francisco, Paris, and New York...
...And here is little Alana, shrugging and turning away...
...Wandering through a canyon outside of Marin, exhausted and feverish, Alison examines each of the pictures of her past ? an effort to understand its import...
...Alison, herself slowly being abandoned by the fashion world, becomes her last remaining connection and the witness to her suffering: "Veronica did not fall away or seem finished...
...her expression suggests fear as well as aggression...
...Prettiness is always about pleasing people," Veronica tells her...
...Her pain was so deep that she had become deep, whether she liked it or not...
...At the center of these memories is Alison's unlikely friend Veronica, a flamboyant proofreader who upsets Alison's notions ofbeauty and love...
...Reviewed by Kristen Case Editor, "Twelfth Street Review" The photograph on the back of Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill's 1988 collection of short stories, looks a great deal like a model's headshot...
...I jerked it away as if I'd been bitten...
...I would break a wineglass in a hostess' bathroom and walk on it until the splinters were unseeable...
...I don't have to do that anymore...
...About a conversation with Veronica shortly before her death, Alison tell us: "Her voice was the same bitterly inflected instrument...
...But here is Beauty in a white dress...
...Maybe deeper than any human being can bear to be...
...In nine of the pictures here, Mary Gaitskill is a writer returning to familiar terrain, capitalizing on the attraction of glamour and brutality, struggling to wrest meaning from a resistant subject...
...She seemed to go on forever, all the way down to the ground...
...Alison wins a modeling contest, becomes the mistress of a powerful and vindictive French modeling agent, is humiliated and cheated on, returns home to New Jersey, then moves to New York...
...You ght a dark whiff of shit, the sweetness of cherries, the laughter of girls...
...Their actions and motivations remain elusive, illuminated in sudden flickers and fleeting insights...
...the problem is to a large degree her subject...
...Gaitskill'suninflected prose renders Alison's life in a series of carefully defined flat images that never quite attain their suggested significance...
...It's my show now...
...In the 10th, she is telling us something about our lives we badly need to know...
...Here is the pumping music, grinding her into meat and dirt...
...After Veronica contracts AIDS from her unfaithful lover, Duncan, she is gradually deserted by her friends...
...The details of Alison's youth seem arbitrary and hollow because most of them are arbitrary and hollow— hopelessly disconnected from the emotions running beneath the surface...
...I love her, I thought, I love her...
...The failure of images to bear meaning is not, however, a failure of Gaitskill's prose...
...The sweetness didn't go with the habitual hard showiness of the voice, and the incongruence gave it a wobbly, unprotected quality that pierced me...
...It explores the hidden relation of its glossy surface to the dark reality of AIDS, which ascends as the novel unfolds like a fairy tale monster from the deep...
...A woman writing a book on the history of troll dolls would look at me and talk loudly about the trivial nature ofbeauty and fashion...
...A short actress would turn her back on me while I was speaking and put her arms around Patrick...
...Trapped in the economy ofbeauty, Alison sees another reality in Veronica...
...It is tempting to read Veronica, Gaitskill's first novel since Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), in terms of her biography...
...But now there was hope in its center, and that subtly made it sweeter...
...While Gaitskill draws minor characters with brutal precision, both Veronica and Alison resist categorization or facile description...
...Describing a bitchy model named Alana, for example, Alison remembers: "On the runway, she was a bolt of lightning in a white Chanel dress...
...The troubled relationship between appearances and inner feelings lends Veronica its heft, and it is a testament to Gaitskill's powers that she manages unselfconsciously to infuse the story of a burnedout fashion model suffering from hepatitis with the stuff of tragedy...
...But in the 10th, I'm the fool and it's her show now...
...Like lightning, the contrast cut down the center of the earth: We all eat and shit, screw and die...
...Both Gaitskill and Alison, the former model who narrates Veronica, ran away from home at age 16—Gaitskill ending up a stripper in Toronto, Alison selling flowers outside a strip club in San Francisco and occasionally turning tricks...
...Ultimately, though, she exposes what is behind the picture and reveals its essence in a few hard sentences...
...The author's head is angled, lightly supported by an artfully placed palm, and dramatically lit—one side of her face in shadow, the other washed in white light...
...Veronica, a chronicle of Alison's modeling career and its gradual unraveling, is set primarily in the garish, garbagescented world of Manhattan's downtown fashion scene...
...Alison and Veronica's relationship, like so many in Gaitskill's fiction, is full of misunderstandings and unvoiced sentiments, yet also punctuated with fleeting moments of genuine affinity...
...Her general inability to do this gives the few fragile, momentary successes a special brilliance that Gaitskill proffers with an incisive lyricism...
...Over the course of a single day, Alison relives her life in flashes...
...In the 10th, she is telling the truth...
...I asked myself why and was answered immediately...
...When you stop being pretty, you don't have to do that anymore...
...Much of Gaitskill's work is flux and shimmer, a wild ride that is perfect for portraying S&M clubs, photographers forcing models to masturbate for the camera, cocaine abuse, and graphic sex...
...For just a second, that's the picture I saw...
...Imagine 10 pictures of this conversation," she explains...
...Both became successful in New York in the 1980s...
...It all glides by in her retelling, "like empty potato chip bags thrown from a car...
...Everyone applauded—and no wonder...
...Here are the other girls coming in waves to fill Beauty's slot...
...Thumping music took you into the lower body, where the valves were working...
...Several of Alison's lovers, although described with sharp particularity, are forgettable...
...I would change my mind and guiltily mop the glass with a wet towel...
...She recalls the aftermath of her encounter with Patrick: "Six months later, his friends would ignore me and sting me with weapons made of the finest jealousy and gossamer contempt...
...She turned and gave a look...
...But then she said something with such force that a tiny bit of spit flew from her mouth and landed on my hand...
...In nine of them, she's the fool and I'm the person who has something...
Vol. 88 • September 2005 • No. 5
