Remembering Things You'd Forgotten

I read Mary Gaitskill's Veronica hoping to have confirmed the judgment that she is "one of the most transgressive American writers working today," as one review put it. I should have known better. Words like "transgressive" and "subversive" are used so promiscuously to describe any fiction that threatens to "critique" reigning norms, just as "innovative" is used reflexively to describe any work that doesn't obediently proceed in the narrative direction prescribed by Freytag's Triangle, that normally I just disregard their invocation as so much boilerplate. Having read in a number of places, however, that Gaitskill was a truly transgressive and unconventional writer, I decided to see what Veronica had to offer.

No doubt I should not take out on Gaitskill my impatience with such critical inflation, but I don't think she's done much to discourage the idea she's a "daring" writer. As it turns out, the attempted transgressions in this novel are entirely transgressions of sexual morality or propriety. In the milieu in which its characters move--the fashion industry, AIDS-frightened New York City in the 1980s--there's lots of sex, much of it exploitative and unhealthy. Apparently we're to be taken aback by passages such as this one:

. . . Alain looked up and smiled. "Do you like [the haircut]?" I asked. He stood and said of course he liked it, it had been his idea. Then he jumped on me.

I say "jumped" because he was quick, but he wasn't rough. He was strong and excessive, like certain sweet tastes--like grocery pie. But he was also precise. It was so good that when it was over, I felt torn open. Being torn open felt like love to me; I thought it must have felt the same to him. I knew he had a girlfriend and that he lived with her. But I was still shocked when he kissed me and sent me home. . . .

Frankly, the idea that the fashion world is full of sexual predators and encourages a sadomasochistic attitude toward sex doesn't come as much of a shock to me. If you really want a disturbing portrayal of the way in which women are inculcated into a kind of reflexive sadomasochism, read Elfriede Jelinek, whose fiction truly transgresses modern myths about sex and romantic love without relying on the superficial adornments of the sociological "expose." Ultimately, all of the characters in Veronica (maybe especially the title character, who is not the novel's protagonist but whose fate is a sort of cautionary supplement to the protagonist's story) seem to have been assigned their roles in a kind of retrospective account of the hedonistic 1980s, but none of them rise above the highly schematic requirements of these roles. They're types, duly chosen to represent various attitudes and excesses of the era:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that's what I wanted; it seemed like that's what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next--songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

In his review of the novel, Benjamin Strong writes that "If Veronica has a weakness, it's that it sometimes feels more like a document of the last decade than the current one." Frankly, I'd have just as much trouble with a novel that seems to be a "document" of the current moment as with one that "documents" a previous epoch, but Strong does make a relevant point: Veronica, published in 2005, already seems dated, an evocation of a period and of characters that come off as mere historical curiosities. Francine Prose also describes Veronica as essentially a period piece--"Gaitskill may be, among contemporary authors, the one best-suited to capture, on the page, a period when the marriage of sex and death was such an extraordinarily close one"--but claims to have found reading the book unsettling, "like biting into a nightmare-inducing, virally loaded madeleine. Halfway through, you may find yourself remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time when half your friends were dying young, and when you feared that anyone who had ever had sex (including, of course, yourself) was doomed to a premature and hideous demise."

It's telling that for Prose what is "nightmarish" about reading Veronica involves "remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time. . . ." What the novel offers is an opportunity to "remember," to recollect from a perspective of relative safety a "moment in time," even if the memories are full of doom and foreboding. But the memories themselves, the effect of being transported back to this time when one realized sex and death could be so nearly aligned, are what is "nightmare-inducing" about the book. Neither its prose, its formal ingenuity, nor even its specific imagery is responsible for its allegedly profound impact. Its status as "document," as a reminder of how traumatic the "AIDS era" was for those who lived through it, remains its primary virtue.

Gaitskill is not a bad writer, but her occasional stylistic flourishes ("her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through water") cannot bring its first-person narrator Alison to life as anything other than a stock figure (the unlucky victim of her times) or compensate for the ulitmately bland and unengaging memoir-like structure Gaitskill employs as a way of narrating Alison's life and times. Prose claims that Veronica places no. . .strain on our memory. It creates an atmosphere, provokes a response, and suffuses us with an emotion that we can easily, all too easily, summon up." She means this as a compliment and apparently believes this makes the novel "unconventional," since we are not requried to revisit the narrative, "searching for some forgotten plot turn, some event or aspect of character." I don't myself find this strategy very unconventional; if anything, it's just a way of reinforcing the cheap appeal to established iconographic images, our cultural memory of the 80s. At best, it's the kind of "newness" that, as I argued in the previous post, is more interested in the sociopolitical than the literary.

I managed to finish Veronica, but if I hadn't decided it might serve as the subject of a post discussing the use of fiction for "captur[ing], on the page, a period," I probably would not have made it through the second half of the novel, which seems especially rote and uninspired. Once I understood Veronica was mostly an excuse for summoning up its chosen "period," I expected it to unfold in a more or less predictable fashion (pun intended). It did.

Comments

[Richard]

Interesting. I'd say I mostly agree with you, though I liked it more than you did. I was largely unaware of Gaitskill's apparent reputation when I read the book earlier this year. Also, I am either too young to "remember things I'd forgotten" about the 80s she is writing about, or I didn't have friends like that (which is only to say that, if that's what people are praising about it, I can't relate). It did not occur to me to see anything especially "transgressive" in the book. In the end, I did like it, though I had a hard time seeing what the big deal was. It struck me as fairly conventional, with some nice local prose peppered throughout, which is pretty much what kept me reading.

[AC]

I gave up about halfway through, so I can't really comment on the book as a whole, but I was disappointed, given all of the praise it received. Like Richard, I'm too young to remember the 80s, so maybe that was part of the problem. But given the number of movies and books about the 80s (good and bad), it didn't strike me as transgressive at all. And as you pointed out, the characters were lifeless and cold.

[Rodney Welch]

Excellent criticism, Dan.

Two thoughts, not entirely related to your post but nonetheless generated by it:

* I like Gaitskill's prose and suspect I would like "Veronica" -- but there's a problem I've always had with writing that is top-heavy with sex. It seems exhibitionistic, as if the author is advertising his or her own world-weary sophistication. It's a way of turning yourself into a pin-up. I often wonder if there isn't a message at the bottom of it all, which is, basically: I'm hot. I've done everything I've described and I've done it a lot and there are no end of people waiting for me to do it with them. Take a number.

At the same time, I have to balance that thought against the fact that sexual adventure is simply part of life and as worthy a topic for fiction as anything else. It's just that I tend to agree with Anthony Burgess that when people write about sex they are basically writing about how they, personally, make love. So in a way it can take the reader out of the book.

*Your comments made me think of Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance," which is itself very much a "document" novel, and a rather dull one: a semi-fictionalized DeLilloesque regurgitation of the Patty Hearst story that has little imaginative or interpretive scope, no fresh insight regarding the story or its era, and gives the mind almost nothing on which to feed, leaving me to wonder why the author even bothered. Critics loved it though.

[Jimmy Beck]

Since you seized upon the idea of "capturing a period," Dan, I'm wondering if you've read Brock Clarke's essay in the latest VQR that dismantles Rachel Donadio's (and others', especially Tom Wolfe) argument that we're living in a nonfiction moment and the novel cannot do it justice blah blah blah. Anyway, it's a terrific essay (Clarke's, that is) and the Veronica reviewers' wrongheaded fixation on the idea that fiction's most essential job is to "capture" a real time and place reminded me of it.

[Dan Green]

I haven't read that essay, but it does look like something I'll want to track down.