Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

So I read Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I liked it. But--cue the qualifications to that statement, which I feel nervous making but here goes--I had high expectations which I didn't meet with this book. But I take the blame for that. I read much of the book while exhausted. It can be a fairly challenging text--complex but not hard to follow, rich with meaning if you're alert enough to pull it out. (I was ready to write a thesis on the role of "containers" after I'd read about 15-20 pages of the book, but then fatigue kicked in and I lost the thread of my thought. Not a book to sleep through, let's say that.)

Plus, okay, I'm a boy. Maybe that was working against me. Dunno.

I know I linked this article before but now I think I actually get it and can point out that Francine Prose really nails it:

And then there are novels that speak a language entirely their own. We recognize them as novels, though we would have a hard time saying why that should be so. They may have some, or none, of the elements I've listed above, but these features seem almost extraneous or inessential. [...] When we remember these untraditional novels, we tend to forget trivial and even relatively important details of story and character. What stays with us is an atmosphere, an emotion, the memory of how it felt to read the book and of what it was like to inhabit a particular sensibility--the mind of a character or of an author--for a certain period of time. Perhaps what we recall most vividly is how a writer's language rose to meet the challenge of maintaining our interest without the conventions (suspense, and so forth) that more commonly sustain it.

Mary Gaitskill's new book, Veronica, is one of these unconventional fictions, though among its peculiar charms is the fact that it seems to think of itself as a much more ordinary sort of novel than it is.

I mean, really, that's it, right there; it's not a book you read for the story or the resolution reached through it but rather for the sort of rolling-waves-against-the-beach quality of it. You listen to the book crash against the shores of your brain, maybe. It forms a brilliant sort of white noise, I guess. I think. I'm not sure: part of my problem is that I just don't know what my "memory of how it felt to read the book" is, really. Of course that doesn't matter because you read the quote above and either ordered the book or decided it wasn't for you.

Let me put it this way: I want this book to be for you. Even if I can't well explain why.

As I think I told my girlfriend, I liked the book well enough, but I think it'll click for me better the next time I read it, later, sometime. The book, to me, feels like a message that comes from someone else. I mean someone really else. Maybe all I caught this first time was the form of the message, the strange bottle it floated up to my island's shore in. Maybe next time I'll better understand what's inside the bottle.

I think maybe I was trying a little too hard to compare this book to some other books that one might possibly fruitfully compare this book to: Jennifer Egan's Look At Me, for example; I've read somewhere on the Internets that people make that comparison, and find one author or the other lacking, in comparison. Or maybe Janice Galloway's The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, though I think maybe the connection there is a bit harder to make. (Both books I loved, by the way.) I think there's points of similarity between all three books, here and there--physical beauty as time-conquered beast, depression as an animal unto itself, sadness, whatever--but Veronica is too much its own thing. Comparisons here might make for fun coffee conversation but they aren't going to get you too far in life. (I think.)

That said: when you read it, because I feel you probably should read it at some point, the first time you hit the "nine times out of ten" image, know that Emily Dickinson rose from the dead and physically took the top of my head right off, right there. Because that was some damned dirty poetry right there.

I also suspect I'm selling myself and/or the book short, and that my opinion and feeling and attitude are much higher than I might realize.

However my brain eventually settles on the topic, I roll on ahead, or backwards in this case; I'm now working through Gaitskill's second short story collection, Because They Wanted To, which is pretty much just blatantly awesome, so far, and might--might!--serve as a better entry point into Gaitskill's writings. Maybe. Don't quote me on that. The writing is generally more straight-forward but the ideas and depth are all there. I imagine I might have more to say about this book later.

(Also check out CAAF's much more eloquent and generally better reaction to Veronica at Tingle Alley; something tells me she got the book much better than I did, none of this pissy-pants "But I was sleepy!" crap you're getting from me.)