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Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. There are no doubt as many ways to write about this book as there are to fall down a flight of stairs. But the only one that seems feasible to me at the moment is to ramble on about it in a scattershot, discontinuous way, listening to Back harpsichord toccatas, groggy on Xanax, and filled with the kind of general self-loathing that has its genesis in...well, in things that are the exact opposite of those that lead the gutsy, rebellious, and selfishly ambitious narrator to the other end of the same rope in this devastating novel. 

I thought Gaitskill's stellar collection of short stories, "Because They Wanted To, was a mind-blower. And it is. But the novel "Veronica" blows the rest of you away as well. It's the story of Alison, a woman approaching fifty, wrecked by the misuses and abuses of her youth, which have left her with a chronically aching body and a case of Hepatitis that will, sooner or later, quite likely sooner, kill her. She makes her living cleaning offices, but she was once an up-and-coming fashion model, gracing the glossy pages of high-end magazines, feted in Paris and New York, appearing in music videos, and invited to the hippest A-list parties. 

But the salad days of Alison's life are many calendar pages in the past; a past in which she met the title character of novel, a woman some twenty-years her senior, Veronica.

Veronica worked as an office temp, which is where Alison meets her during a lull in her modeling career. Veronica has a faded, shabby patchwork kind of glamour; she's a woman who has seen much better days and doesn't so much hope to see them again as relive a parody version of them with a threadbare gallows irony. She's a lot like what Alison will see looking back at her in the mirror two decades down the road. Is it a premonition of this future collusion that draws these two women together?

Veronica has a penchant for behavior that looks self-destructive, but as she explains, she always knows where the door is and gets out in time. Except in the case of her boyfriend Duncan, a bisexual who is by turns cold and passionate, "playfully" abusive, and dangerously unfaithful. It's the latter that proves tragic, as he contracts AIDS and injects it into Veronica, signing both their contracts with the Grim Reaper. 

The novel takes place on two timelines that Gaitskill skillfully weaves together. Alison alternates the story of her current diminished life with the shiny memories of her glamor days as an ambitious young model during the heyday of the AIDS crisis. But even her best of times, stripped of their superficial tinsel, reveal a shabby truth: her sadly dysfunctional childhood,her parent's unhappy marriage, her father's chronic depression, mother's sexual frustration, and Alison's strained relations with both parents and her two sisters. Her modeling career, too, for all it's glitter, celebrity, and easy money, turns out to be a precarious balancing act above an abyss where false-friends, parasites, envious rivals, and unscrupulous agents are always looking to feed off your good-fortune while you're hot—and ready to discard you like last week's trash the instant you're not.

Ultimately, it is the relative "realness" of Veronica that draws Alison to this rather gauche, over-the-top, often embarrassing character. And as Veronica begins expressing the full-fledged symptoms of the merciless disease that will kill her, stripping away every last veil of tattered chic and second-hand dignity with which the older woman has shielded herself up to now, the more the authentic Veronica stands revealed in all her naked but somehow defiant vulnerability.

Yet it's only twenty years later, now that Alison faces the betrayal of her own body, the undermining of her own health, and the dismantling of her once stunning beauty, that she fully realizes the awful and awe-inspiring lesson that Veronica inadvertently taught her about true beauty. Late, but not belatedly, certainly not too late, Alison will descend the hill she's climbed, literally and figuratively, a hill at the top of which one slowly grows to suspect she may have been contemplating ending her life. She comes back down a changed woman with a new covenant, one that will enable her to appreciate the time she has left.

As moving and as powerful "Veronica" is, it's Gaitskill's prose that sets it light-years apart as real literature. Her descriptions of people and her deft dissection of their thoughts and actions are so startlingly, uniquely exact and so poetically unexpected they virtually constitute a new way to describe character. With the use of metaphor and simile, Gaitskill is able to render visible the normally invisible, to impart to the subtlest and most ephemeral of psychological realities a concreteness few other contemporary writers can match. 

Her prose is of the highest calibre. She's the type of author you can read simply for the pleasure of riding the rhythms of her sentences, mesmerized by her masterful facility with words, with which she can seem to do anything she chooses. But there's more going on here than just verbal virtuosity. For you are ultimately being drawn along the muscular river of Gaitskill's intelligence passed the dazzling, sensual imagery straight in the absolute heart of darkness.   

Generally, I'm not a fan of that "sick-and-dying" genre of storytelling; they're like political speeches, you don't even have to sit through them to know what's coming; you've heard it all before. But what Gaitskill does at almost every turn is defy your expectations, undercut the potentially saccharine, and offers no easy answers.

Neither Alison nor Veronica are easy people to like.Veronica is blowzy, loud, and crude. Alison is acerbic, cynical, and intellectually circumspect no matter how emotional she may get. If affirming revelations are offered, they are moderate and provisional. Alison never forgets that. In the end, we all lose and the loss is ugly, and we lose forever.

Still, at the end of this book, as at the end of this review, there is a kind of redemption. Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason" replaces Bach, the xanax grogginess subsides a bit, the sun comes out, and instead of taking another pill, or half a bottle more, one feels instead like having something to eat and taking a walk to the mailbox in what has suddenly become a far brighter day than it seemed before.