Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill Gaitskill is a poet. She says some incredibly beautiful things in this book. I especially like the bits about identity. The story has bookends that wrap around it in the form of a fairy tale told by the narrator’s mother. This adds a certain sense of balance to the book, which is contrasted by the way Gaitskill uses time as a fluid object and interweaves present and past. Sometimes to the point of blurring the two. She has an amazing attention to detail and would be a fascinating person to meet, I think.
The things she says are beautiful, sad and exquisite. Here are a couple examples. Oh, I also liked the way she talked about herself, in a fashion, on TV talking about her new book. She quoted herself saying something chipper about plot development.
Book Read on 11 / 7 / 2007
We all came out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many on the inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don[‘t even know what it is, or what it’s for. p 143
Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it. Feed it until it’s too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. Examine it for flaws. Not just the body, but the mind, too. Keep going over the symptoms. It’s not a character defect; it’s an illness. Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. Dazzle its ears with music that never stops playing. Send it to graze in vast aisles of food so huge and flawless that it seems to be straining something more than food. Dazzle its mind with visions of terror. Set it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When d the dark comes, pray: I love my ass. p. 120
I would break a wineglass in a hostess’s bathroom and walk on it until the splinters were unseeable. I would change my mind and guiltily mop the glass with a wet towel. p 174.
Reviewer: William Koplitz
4 out of 5