Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon

Ever since "Bad Behavior," her story collection of psychical and sexual irruption, was published in 1986, Mary Gaitskill has been one of the most transgressive American writers working today, shining a harsh light on the contradictory dynamic of desire and repulsion, awareness and blindness. She's focused primarily on the pain specific to women in her short stories and one previous novel, "Two Girls, Fat and Thin." Gaitskill's new novel, "Veronica," is her first book-length work of fiction in eight years. Only slightly less obsessed with psychological and sexual trauma as her earlier writing, Gaitskill's also turned spiritual, and even hopeful in her latest work.

The narrator of "Veronica," Alison drops into and out of and back into modeling, first in Paris, then in New York. She starts as a girl handing out flowers in storefronts, then she's in East Village parties and sharing an office with the novel's title character, a proofreader given to wearing bowties and men's suits. Gaitskill worked as a proofreader during the boom years of the 1980s, and that setting, which also appears in other work, comes off done in shorthand in "Veronica;" for a writer, the overly familiar can grow sketchy.

The snap of the trap, with a noticeable lack of redemption, pervades Gaitskill's work, its sufferers looking out from their world, reflecting a spiritual emptiness. Veronica draws Alison into the "fiercingly ugly" exuberance of her world. The thrill of hatred as well as love is the closest thing to redemption for most of "Veronica" — the liberation of the psyche from oppressive norms. "Models are stupid cows," one character enthuses.

Alison's mother is also repeatedly referred to as a cow, a designation she earns falling flat on her face in a parking lot in front of her husband and young daughter. "She lifted her head and made a long, low moan, like a cow." Ten-year-old Alison looks to her father, who is "smiling, like it was really funny to see my mom fall on her face and make a stupid noise."

A few years ago it was the C word that finally buckled and went mainstream. Is the same thing happening here with the particular misogyny of calling a woman a "cow"? Gaitskill could be leading the charge, yet there's ambivalence in her work over appropriating male jargon — the self-hatred still stings even as the invective is aimed outward; bad karma's everywhere.

Gaitskill worked as a stripper and there's always been a detached self-exposure to her fiction. Nearly 20 years after "Bad Behavior," "Veronica" still has its hand down its own pants — open an apartment door and a woman is sitting on the couch in dirty underwear; a pretty boy bears a canker sore on one lip; a chained masochist crawls around on the floor of a sex club. Alison walks around naked in front of her sister, who looks away. Pinpointing the moments of squalid sensation, Gaitskill's fiction runs roughshod over such twittering tales of love as "Bridget Jones' Diary" and her American cousin, chick lit.

The nightmare of simplistic duality creates the stifling quality of Gaitskill's work — her characters are frequently trapped, either by someone else's emotional demands or their own self-blindness. Adding to that familiar raw style, Gaitskill has taken up Joan Didion's territory of epiphanic despair. Didion's narrators were usually observers of a well-to-do American woman who'd gone through Third World hell and come out bruised yet with an austere dignity. Gaitskill stakes a claim in that territory: Alison knows how the whole story ends, and characters are framed in their mortality. Recurring phrases, reminiscent of liturgical responses, end the occasional chapter, lending a fractured quality, while the repetition bears a sliver of hope, of placing the disparate moments into a pattern.

Veronica becomes both child and mother to Alison, and both martyr and anti-martyr. In the Bible, St. Veronica wipes Jesus' face on his way to Calvary, his image staining her shawl forever. There's transcendence in that, but also diminution.

— Stephen Bracco (sbracco@yahoo.com)