Alison, a 46-year-old ex-model whose face is now “broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks,” trudges through San Rafael, California. She is sick with hepatitis, a condition exacerbated by the codeine she takes to dull the pain in an arm incapacitated by a car accident and a failed surgery. She describes her current as the “gray present,” through which “the bright past” sears, unrelentingly pulling her back. As the novel continues, less and less of the “present” Alison is seen, eclipsed by the occasionally garish shine of her history.
As a teenager, Alison ran away from home, residing in the marijuana haze of 1970s San Francisco before success in a modeling contest swept her off to Paris. She chronicles the model’s world there, parties stocked with a cornucopia of drugs and an equal profusion of almost ludicrously beautiful people. When her affair with the married head of her modeling agency ends, she flees the Parisian world of a “rich, dreamy mud of sound” for New York city. But her addiction to the world of beauty, beauty like an aristocratic title that one possesses or does not, calls her back into Manhattan’s modeling world, where she celebrates considerable success in the 1980s.
Only then does the ‘Veronica’ of the title arrive. A plain, unstylish, and overweight woman, Veronica initially only attracts Alison’s distaste when the two meet temping for an advertising agency. But like the tension of Gaitskill’s previous novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, this book is truly about the fast friendship that develops between these two unlikely candidates. More than anything else, Alison returns to her memories of Veronica, as the older woman battled with her contraction of HIV from her emotionally-distant bisexual husband.
Veronica is the mouthpiece for the gritty truths that characterise Gaitskill as an author, and as we realize that Alison’s friendship with Veronica is the only happy part of her predominantly tempestuous life, another contradiction is drawn. At once poetic and fierce, the gorgeous language does not flinch away from the putrid, the caustic, and the bitterness of truth; her metaphors engage a kind of lethal precision of the word. Like the sheathing of a one-gorgeous model in the sickly frame of an aging woman, Gaitskill continually draws upon the intimacy of opposites, of beauty and ugliness, even in her own prose.